Lily Gladstone was said to be the Supporting Actress frontrunner for her wonderful turn in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but that’s no more. Gladstone was submitted as Lead Actress by Apple, a total surprise move on the streamer’s part.
Spike Lee has seen “Killers of the Flower Moon” and thinks it’s a “great film.” He also believes that Gladstone can win the Oscar, calling her performance a “lead role”:
“Well, you know, Scorsese, that’s my guy. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a great film. That Native American woman, Lily Gladstone, she’s winning an Oscar. And I don’t think that’s a supporting role. I think that’s a leading role. She’s got my vote.”
I will admit that Gladstone’s performance in ‘Killers’ is very much a supporting turn, but the film is 206 minutes and she does have a lot of screen time. It helps that her sad-eyed performance as Mollie Burkhart is absolutely sublime. In fact, Lily is the emotional center of the story. It makes sense.
Later on in the interview, Lee also calls Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” a “great film,” but says he should have shown the resulting atrocities of the nuclear bomb in Japan:
I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people. People got vaporized. Many years later, people are radioactive. It’s not like he didn’t have power. He tells studios what to do. I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan. Understand, this is all love. And I bet he could tell me some things he would change about “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X.”
As you might already know, Nolan refused to show the effects of the bomb on the Japanese people, which did irk a few people.
There’s this great scene where Cillian Murphy’s Robert J. Oppenheimer looks at a slide show of the horrific Japanese aftermath of the bomb; he can barely look at it, clearly affected by what he’s seeing. In my eyes, that scene was more than enough in subtly showcasing the ravages of the bomb.