A citizen of Navajo Nation and a teacher of settler colonialism, Marxism and queer indigenous studies, University of Minnesota’s Melanie Yazzie defines herself on her umn.edu web page as follows:

Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart is a supporting character — this was clear after Killers of the Flower Moon’s Cannes premiere last May.

Mollie sidesteps traditional definings of lead character behavior at every turn — basically being a passive victim who doesn’t react to murders of family members and the attempted methodical murder of herself except with sullen silences, and who spends half the film in bed as she slowly dies from poisoning.

It’s an under-energized (i.e., dull) performance sans tempest and catharsis.

Gladstone’s Best Actress campaign is first and foremost an identity bandwagon and, not to sound overly harsh, a case of unmitigated category fraud if there ever was one.

But the woke identity celebrationists see this as an historic opportunity to shower Gladstone with love and largesse and thereby symbolically cleanse
themselves of any sort of association or guilt over white Hollywood’s decades of mistreatment or mischaracterizing of Native American culture (as echoed by Marlon Brando during the ‘73 Oscar telecast and the subsequent slagging of the late Sacheen Littlefeather, or something like that).

“The one inarguable thing you’ve said [about] Gladstone is that Mollie is too passive and shoved to the background to be a leading role.” — HE’s own Kristi Coulter.

Pure narrative, pure cultural politics — zero to do with quality of performance.

You can stand me up before the gates of hell, and I won’t back down on this.

As someone who literally stood in front of that huge oil painting of Tony Montana and Elvira in the spring of ‘83, having snuck onto the Universal sound stage where a large portion of Tony’s gaudy Miami mansion had been built…it only just hit me today that the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip of the painting in Scarface is not quite the same as the bullet-strafed photo of same that we’re all familiar with…compare Michelle Pfeiffer’s eyes…they’re gazing in different directions plus her top expression conveys an air of contentment while she looks vaguely sullen and frosty in the alternate. Al Pacino looks chillier also in the below photo.

…and it doesn’t specifically matter anyway as we know who’s going to win the Best Actress Oscar, but if we could somehow know what we will never in fact know, who would be in second place, Maestro’s Carey Mulligan or Poor Things Emma Stone?

How great would it be if the actress who could arguably be said to have delivered the finest (deepest, strongest, most fully penetrating) lead performance actually won? Yeah, I know…dream on.

It’s hard not to associate Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus, 2.9.24) with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which is based on Alisdair Gray 1992 novel but has been more commonly referred to over the last few months as Barbie Meets Frankenstein. Lisa began shooting in August ‘22, or roughly 13 years after the development of Poor Things had begun.