If awards season belongs to anyone this year, it's Ariana DeBose. She previously cleaned up with a Golden Globe Award and posing for magazine covers.
Ariana started out as a dancer, and self-deprecatingly, she said she sounded like a 'dead duck' when she first started singing at 15. 'I was really bad,' she laughs. 'Like I just kind of sounded like a dead duck.. It wasn't good. But it gave me something to work for.'
With her profile on the rise, the actress now has 3430,000 followers on Instagram - and she says she now has help from a team to help with the demands of social media. But Ariana is dealing with increased visibility, and the pressures of that, positively.
'I just feel like this journey has presented me with one opportunity after another to do something I've never done to continue to challenge myself,' she says, 'and so and that includes visibility. How do you work through your normal life, and just be a normal human while you're someone who is highly visible to the world? And there's no real good answer for that.'
And Ariana might now be winning all these accolades for West Side Story, but, originally, the actress wasn't even going to audition. 'I am very glad that I got out of my own way and auditioned,' she tells Grazia.
Explaining why she didn't want to take part straight away, she said: 'I think I was hesitant because Anita doesn't normally look like me. I'm Afro-Latina and the Latinos that are really recognised and prevalent in the industry are predominantly white presenting, or light-skinned brown women, and I am a darker-skinned Black woman. And I'm very proud of that. But we're not the ones that normally get to tell this story, so I didn't think it was gonna go my way even if I had the skill set to do it.
'And then somewhere along the way I realised it's not my job to make [Steven Spielberg's] decision for him,' she continued. 'It's my job to go in and, and do my best and offer up a perspective that maybe he's never seen before. So that's what I did, and let him make his own decision.'
In the original West Side Story, Anita was played by Rita Moreno, who also won the best supporting actress Oscar in 1962. It makes Ariana only the second Latina actor to win an Oscar, after Rita, and the first queer woman of colour.
READ MORE: Oscars 2022: The Winners List