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Lily Gladstone has likened awards ceremonies to the brutal Netflix drama, Squid Game, where desperate contestants compete in deadly competitions for a cash prize. Speaking on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Gladstone opened up about her experiences on the Oscars circuit, thanks to multiple nominations for her role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Asked whether she enjoys awards shows, Gladstone remarked: “The Globes was a little bit like Squid Game. The reality is, you’re in shapewear, you need to pee, and you only have the commercial breaks to do so. So, it’s just a mad scramble, and that’s when you get to meet idols like Meryl Streep. Of course, that part is not bad.”

In January, Gladstone won the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama, the first Indigenous woman to achieve this, delivering much of her acceptance speech in the Blackfoot language. She expressed gratitude for being able to speak even a little of her language, noting how Native actors used to speak lines in English, only for sound mixers to run them backward to mimic Native languages on camera.

She added, “This is a historic win, and it doesn’t belong to just me. 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.”

Gladstone was the major acting winner for Scorsese’s drama about the mass killing of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma, although she lost the best actress Oscar to Emma Stone for Poor Things.

Gladstone joins a list of frequently nominated celebrities who have voiced skepticism about the awards circuit, among them Joaquin Phoenix, John Gielgud, Woody Allen, Anthony Hopkins, and Katharine Hepburn.

The late Glenda Jackson once called such prize-giving “a whole shebang of nonsense,” sharing that her mother had polished her Oscars to find “nothing but base metal underneath.” In 2016, Jackson remarked, “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.”