The Problem With the Oscars’ Idea of a ‘Good Movie’
Every year, plenty of excellent films are excluded from the awards-season conversation for reasons that have nothing to do with talent or artistry. This year is no different.
“Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance,” says Jo March (played by Saoirse Ronan) in a scene near the end of 2019’s Little Women, fearing that no one will want to read the book she’s writing about her family. “Maybe we don’t see those things as important because people don’t write about them,” her sister Amy (Florence Pugh) replies. The question of what art gets to be lionized and revered is one that Little Women’s writer and director, Greta Gerwig, fixated on when adapting the work for the big screen.
, Gerwig said that while she worried this exchange between
