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The Little Women Stars Just Said What We're All Thinking About Greta Gerwig's Oscar Snub


When the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced on Monday, it was clear the Academy had egregiously snubbed the work of women, including Greta Gerwig’s directorial efforts in Little Women and Jennifer Lopez’s acting in Hustlers. Plenty of people went off on Twitter, but the actual stars of Little Women decided to add their voices to the conversation, with Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh opening up about how Gerwig’s undertaking as a director should have been recognized.

Ronan (Jo March in the film) and Pugh (Amy March), were both nominated for their acting in the movie. Little Women also got nods for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design Achievements, and Original Score. However, despite how well-received Gerwig’s adaptation was, she was conspicuously missing from a nomination list of all-male directors, a category that has historically left out women. Pugh had strong feelings about what Gerwig getting iced out means, telling Deadline it’s “a big blow, especially because she created a film that is so her and so unique and it’s just come out of her, and it’s been a story she’s wanted to do for so long.”

©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

She continued, “I think everybody’s angry and quite rightly so. I can’t believe it’s happened again, but I don’t really know how to solve it. I don’t know what the answer is, other than we’re talking about it.”

Ronan, who also starred in Gerwig’s Lady Bird, also told Deadline, “I’m really happy that the Academy recognized [Gerwig] for Adapted Screenplay and Picture, and I feel like if you’ve been nominated for Best Picture, you have essentially been nominated for Best Director,” she said. “But to me, Greta, since she started, has made two perfect films, and I hope when she makes her next perfect movie, she gets recognized for everything, because I think she’s one of the most important filmmakers of our time.”

We hope so too.



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Little Women Review: Greta Gerwig's Adaptation Is Just As Good As You'd Hoped


She did. And so do the Marches, who can never decide if their passions and desires are sacred or sacrilegious. They each have flaws, or at least challenges: Meg is vain, Jo is tactless, Amy is selfish, and Beth is timid. And they each have ambition: Meg wants to run a beautiful home, Jo wants to breathe life into words, Amy wants to be noticed, and Beth wants to give and receive love. They all want to be as good as their mother (Laura Dern), who gives the scarf off her neck to a person in need. Their attempt to be good girls—and then to chafe against that and try to become great women—is so stressful that it’s a relief when Timothee Chalamet shows up as their wealthy, spoiled neighbor, looking as usual like the face a miniaturist would paint on a matchstick, and instantly starts sniffing the girls’ hair. Same with Meryl Streep, who plays the aunt, striding exquisitely into a new career phase as playing Iconic Old Bitches.

If the movie falls a little short of perfection, it does so for the same reasons as the Alcotts and the Marches did—because it reaches for it so hungrily. Every shot looks like an influencer’s Christmas card. Every other line of dialogue (mostly Alcott’s original, peppered with some additions by Gerwig) would be at home an Etsy throw pillow. I don’t mean to diss or diminish Gerwig’s work—Christmas cards are beautiful, and great quotes are put on merchandise for a reason. Louisa May Alcott was radical but this movie is not, and that makes it infinitely comforting. It also helps us understand why there have been seven remakes of a movie about wonderful young women living during chattel slavery.

Timothee Chalamet as Laurie in Little Women.©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

The exceptionally dreamy cast of actors stride from season to perfectly-captured season, over sandy beaches and snowy fields and leaf-covered hills and rainy cobblestones. Watching them grow and love and experience loss feels like unwrapping a gift and seeing that it’s an album of family photos you had thought were lost. Or at least it did to me, a person who was raised in a family so devoted to Little Women that multiple members of it are named after the characters.

But watching it, I wished the movie’s actors and creators, in their determination to be perfect, could read the words of Mary Oliver, another American woman writer who was influenced by Transcendentalism:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Little Women is devastating and exquisite and a little bit limited. And next time, we hope Meryl and Saoirse do a buddy comedy.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer at Glamour.



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Jane Fonda Says Greta Thunberg Inspired Her to Step Up Her Climate Activism


In the year since 16-year-old Greta Thunberg started striking to demand action on climate change, the movement has grown fast. Young people all over the world have started walking out of school once a week to call on the grownups to do something in an action called #FridaysforFuture. And when activists talk, Jane Fonda listens.

Fonda has been an outspoken advocate for most of her life, protesting war, violence, discrimination, and now our collective inaction when it comes to saving the planet. And last month, Fonda launched her Fire Drill Fridays campaign, promising to protest in Thunberg’s spirit each Friday through the end of 2019. (It’s led to her getting arrested at the U.S. Capitol on a regular basis.)

At Glamour‘s Women of the Year Awards on November 11, Fonda continued to honor Thunberg’s example. She accepted Thunberg’s WOTY Award on the teen’s behalf as Thunberg continues to travel the United States to draw attention to the issue of climate change. With her at New York’s Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the occasion were activists Xiye Bastida, 17, Alexandria Villaseñor, 14, and Jade Lozada, 17. “When I saw Greta Thunberg strike for climate, I knew I had to mobilize my school and our city. Greta’s views match my own, that you take care of the Earth, and the Earth takes care of you,” Bastida said ahead of Fonda’s remarks.

Fonda delivered a passionate speech, reminding the audience of the power of activism. “I have not met Greta Thunberg, but Greta Thunberg changed my life,” Fonda said.

Fonda asked the crowd to become “warriors for the climate” on Thunberg’s behalf and take greater, bolder risks to save our planet. Read Fonda’s entire call-to-action on behalf of Greta Thunberg, below.

“I have not met Greta Thunberg, but Greta Thunberg has changed my life. I’d been feeling anxious and depressed, because I knew I wasn’t doing enough in the face of the catastrophe that is looming.

I drive an electric car. I’m stopping the use of single-use plastic in my home. I eat a lot less meat or fish. Yes, and fish, because fish stocks are plummeting because the ocean is becoming acidified and the climate is warming. These things are wonderful, they’re all very important, and we should all do them. But it’s a good place to start—it’s not a good place to stop. Because individual life choices like these can’t be scaled up in time to get us where we need to be.

But what do I do? I thought, I wondered, I asked myself in the comfort of my Beverly Hills home. And then I read about Greta.

I read that she’s on the spectrum. She has Asperger syndrome, and that means that unlike the rest of us, you see, people with Asperger see and learn things that are not clouded by the rationalizations and obfuscations of the rest of us. They don’t worry about being popular or fitting in. What they see, they see, pure and direct. And I knew that what Greta had seen was the truth.

When she realized what was happening and looked around and saw that no one was behaving like it was a crisis, it so traumatized her that she stopped speaking. When I read this, I decided that I needed to do something more than what I’d been doing.

Greta said, today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep the oil in the ground. And so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules, right? Right? Right? Greta knows that.



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Greta Thunberg: ‘You Have Stolen My Dreams and My Childhood’


Less than a week after hundreds of thousands of children around the world flooded the streets to demand action on climate change, some of the most powerful adults on the planet gathered at the United Nations for a climate summit to discuss what to do about the crisis. Still, the teens had a presence. One of the first speakers to address the group was none other than Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who at 16 has inspired what appears to be…her entire generation.

“This is all wrong,” Thunberg said in one of her most passionate speeches to date. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. Yet I am one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say, ‘We will never forgive you.'”

The speech was a barn burner, but Thunberg is the last person to be all talk and no action. A few hours later Thunberg announced that she and 14 of her peers had filed a suit against five of the world’s major carbon polluters for violating their rights. (The suit alleges that the countries’ actions go against the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.) If it is successful, the U.N. would have to recognize the climate crisis as a children’s rights crisis, which would be a landmark development in the crusade for action on the issue.

On social media the speech and the suit have found an even bigger audience. (And that’s on top of another viral moment of Thunberg’s, when a camera caught her reacting to President Trump—which has already gotten the meme treatment.) “Keep speaking the truth and fighting for big, structural change, @GretaThunberg. Change is possible when millions of people push for it—and when leaders are willing to listen and lead. I promise to fight alongside you and do everything I can to end the climate crisis,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass). Actress Mia Farrow also shared, “@GretaThunberg you have taken on this enormous task and with it, you have given everything and live with the pain of knowing, of trying ceaselessly, of caring with all your being in a world that prioritizes prosperity. But you are moving people—thank you Greta. Thank you.”





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The 2018 Oscar Nominations Saw Several Firsts for Females in Hollywood, Including Greta Gerwig and Mary J. Blige


According to all available statistics, the film industry is especially brutal to the careers of women, who are routinely in the minority when it comes to landing jobs behind the camera. The challenges faced by women of color are even greater. But after a year of change in the cultural conversation around how women are treated in Hollywood and other industries, there are at least a few bright spots to be found in this morning’s Oscar nominations.

For starters, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird has been nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, making Gerwig the first female director to land a Best Director nomination for her directorial debut. The indie darling was already an established screenwriter, with credits on projects in which she also starred, like Frances Ha and Mistress America. But Lady Bird represented her first solo foray behind the camera (she previously co-directed 2008’s Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg). In addition to breaking this particular barrier, Gerwig is now in the teeny tiny club of five women ever nominated for the prize. She joins a handful of other luminaries like Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola. (The club really ought to have included Dee Rees and Patty Jenkins this year, sigh.) Best Director has been won by a woman only once, in 2010 when Kathryn Bigelow took home the Oscar for The Hurt Locker.

Another crack in the glass ceiling comes from Rachel Morrison, who just became the first and only women ever nominated for Best Cinematography, for her work on Dee Rees’s Mudbound. Yes, you read that right, after 90 years, there is finally one woman nominated in this category. Also nominated for her work in Mudbound is Mary J. Blige, who just became the first women ever to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for a performance in a film directed by a woman of color, as well as the first woman to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song in the same year.

Here’s hoping these incredibly talented women go home with some hardware next month.

Related Stories:

See the Full List of Oscar Nominations Here

2018 Is Going to Be a Great Year for Women in Movies

10 Creep-Free Movies to Root for This Awards Season





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