Can 'Fancy Dance' Finally Get Lily Gladstone Her Oscar?

Awards season officially started this week — it gets earlier every year, it seems — and while I don’t get into Oscar punditry on the daily I had to make an exception here. Earlier this year Apple Original Films released Fancy Dance, the Sundance darling directed by Erica Tremblay and starring Lily Gladstone and Isabel Deroy-Olson. The film follows Jax (Gladstone) as she attempts to find her missing sister and raise her niece Roki (Deroy-Olson) in the woman’s absence. But when Roki is removed from the home Jax makes a series of decisions that sees the pair on the run.

Fancy Dance has had a long, winding path to the brief theatrical release it received this June. It premiered at Sundance back in January of 2023 — the place I first saw it — and received critical acclaim out the gate. Considering Gladstone’s soon-to-be Oscar-nominated performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon wouldn’t debut until May of that year, those who saw Fancy Dance back in January were getting a glimpse at Gladstone’s continued power as a performer. The fact that Gladstone had 2 amazing Native-centric films in one year should have been recognized.