Everyone in the blogosphere (critics, columnists, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers) was too chicken to say what I began saying early last fall — that Lily Gladstone was out of her depth as a Best Actress contender, and that she was relying entirely on an identity campaign. Nobody else had HE’s cast-iron cojones in this regard.
The Apple geniuses decided to ignore the reality of Gladstone’s respectable-but-not-great performance and play the political-cultural orchestra by running an identity campaign.
If they really wanted a gold-dipped statuette they would have run her in supporting, but Lily wanted the emphasis to be on celebrating Native American culture and offering voters a potential history-making Best Actress win.
Alas, it was a campaign that was almost all wokey-wokey as her Mollie Burkhart character was obviously not a lead (roughly 50-something minutes out of a 206 minute length) and she wasn’t allowed to bring much in the way of exceptional craft and passion (she mainly glared at the ugly white baddies and lay poisoned in bed during the film’s second half).
But Lily enjoyed a huge promotional ride for herself and boosted Native American profiles in the bargain — a ride that lasted for many, many months. Her life and career were transformed, reaching all the way back to last May’s KOTFM debut in Cannes.