Lily Gladstone has compared awards ceremonies to Squid Game, the brutal Netflix drama about a group of desperate contestants who compete in a series of deadly competitions for a cash prize.
Speaking on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Gladstone discussed her experience of the Oscars circuit, which she participated in thanks to her multiple nominations for her role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Asked whether she enjoys awards shows, Gladstone said: “The Globes was a little bit like Squid Game. I mean the reality is, you’re in shapewear, you need to pee, you have commercial breaks but that’s the only time that you’re able to do it.
“So, it’s just a mad scramble and then that’s the time when you get to like jam in meeting idols like, you know, Meryl Streep. Of course, that part is not bad.”
In January, Gladstone won the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama. She was the first Indigenous woman to have done so, and delivered much of her acceptance speech in the Blackfoot language.
She then continued: “I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent in, up here because, in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.
“This is a historic one, and it doesn’t belong to just me,” she continued. “This is for every little res kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream who is seeing themselves represented, and our stories told by ourselves, in our own words with tremendous allies and tremendous trust with and from each other.”
Gladstone was the major acting winner for Scorsese’s drama about the mass killing of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma, but lost out on the best actress Oscar to Emma Stone, for Poor Things.
Gladstone is one of many frequently nominated celebrities to have voiced scepticism about the awards circuit, among them Joaquin Phoenix, John Gielgud, Woody Allen, Anthony Hopkins and Katharine Hepburn.
The late Glenda Jackson called such prize-giving “a whole shebang of nonsense” and reported that her mother had polished her Oscars to reveal “nothing but base metal underneath”.
Speaking in 2016, Jackson said: “The Oscars have been transformed into what they are now. They have much less to do with cinema. They are about frocks and the whole shebang of nonsense.
“Nowadays, it seems like the real competition is between the different award shows. The Golden Globes, back in my day, if you won you were lucky to get a notice in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. Now the coverage is ludicrous.”
