Oscars 2024: Why Lily Gladstone should win ‘Best Actress’
Based on how awards season has been shaping up so far, and no offence intended to the rest of the nominees, but the race to be named ‘Best Actress’ at the Academy Awards is a two-horse race between Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone.
If anyone other than the star of Poor Things or Killers of the Flower Moon emerged victorious, then it would be viewed as a massive upset. Looking at the trophies each of them has snagged so far, it’s impossible to say with any degree of certainty which one is destined to be named as the winner.
They each won a Golden Globe after being separated by the distinctions between ‘Drama’ and ‘Musical or Comedy’, but Stone ended up running away with the corresponding Bafta when Gladstone wasn’t even recognised in an egregious oversight. Stone also took the Critics’ Choice Award while Gladstone was rewarded by the Screen Actors Guild, so it’s as close a competition as there’s been for some time.
While the lead of Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest genre-bending exercise in existentialism deserves all of the plaudits coming her way, it’s more of a ‘showy’ performance in the traditional sense, one that appeals directly to the hearts, minds, and sensibilities of the Academy by featuring a hugely talented A-list star fully committing to the part and embracing its zany nature.
On paper, it’s the more ‘Oscar-baiting’ of the two, but Killers of the Flower Moon hinges almost entirely on the reserved nature of Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle. She’s the beating emotional heart of the entire three-hour epic; every major story beat flows through her, and she conveys all of that pressure with such grace and poise that her work is equally powerful on both a macro and micro level. She doesn’t need to swing for the fences to create the kind of clips that get played when the nominees are read out on stage, and nor does she have to.
It’s a turn defined by subtlety, nuance, and emotional depth, with Gladstone digging deep into the character to project resilience and determination, even in the face of the historical atrocities that threaten to tear her apart at the seams, both physically and psychologically. It’s real, authentic, and visceral acting, which often requires little more than a change of expression or flicker of the eyes to relay Mollie’s mindset in the clearest of terms.
Whereas Stone’s Bella Baxter is overly performative and necessarily so relative to its function within Poor Things, naturalism is arguably a lot harder to attain to a convincing extent. To that end, it never feels like Gladstone is acting at all, with her own personal experiences and viewpoints being just as intrinsic to the way she brings Mollie to life as any amount of dialogue written on the page. Actors using a character as an extension of their own personality, perspective, and/or belief system is a trick as old as the profession itself, but rarely in recent memory has it been done better than Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.
