Lily Gladstone is opening up about the reaction to her Oscars loss once she went back home to the Blackfeet Nation following her busy awards season with Killers of the Flower Moon.

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The actress was nominated for best actress during the March ceremony, but the Oscar ultimately went to Emma Stone.  However, Gladstone told Esquire that “nobody was upset” that she didn’t win.

The Under the Bridge star recalled her “beautiful trip home,” and how her tribe’s “whole confederacy came together for a Lily Gladstone Day. It was the biggest honor anybody could get. The confederacy decided together that they wanted to do it. It was a beautiful homecoming.”

 

She added, “Two thousand people showed up, from every corner of the US. It was absolutely one of the most moving things that has ever happened in my life.”

Ahead of the event, Gladstone explained that Blackfeet Nation leaders did preemptively assume she would be coming home with a gold statuette, so when she lost, it led to a “funny” call.

“The organizers of the event called me beforehand and they said that they’d got a bunch of little cardboard cut-outs of gold-man statues that looked like an Oscar, to give to the kids. They asked if that was okay, or if it was gonna hurt my feelings. I said: ‘No, absolutely not,’” the actress recalled. “That’s just the whole thing of award campaigns and the competitive nature of pitting art against art. Clearly this film, in this moment, had meaning. It did its job.”

Gladstone added that “regardless of how things turned out,” she’s just fortunate to “have work coming out and I have work lined up,” including some of her most recent projects, Fancy Dance and The Memory Police.

Despite her Oscars loss, the actress took to social media after the 2024 Academy Awards to express her gratitude for fans’ support throughout the award season.