Greta Gerwig’s sensational adaptation of Little Women received some attention from the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, it didn’t get nominated for all the Oscars it deserves. The 6 nominations for Little Women meant it missed out on some big categories it really ought to have been contending in.
This isn’t the first time Little Women has been snubbed this awards season, despite its positive reception by both critics and audiences. It only received two Golden Globes nominations: one for Saoirse Ronan’s performance and another for Alexander Desplat’s score. It was also completely missed out by the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG).
Gerwig’s Little Women is a movie with many merits: heart-tugging music, beautiful costuming, unique directing, star-studded cast. The chemistry across the board is phenomenal. The lead actors craftily humanize their characters while Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Bob Odenkirk are their usual charming, scene-stealing selves even in minor roles. Yet these merits haven’t translated into awards.
Why Little Women Deserves More Nominations Than It Got
Little Women received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Its efforts haven’t gone entirely ignored. However, it is most notably missing nominations around the visual and directorial choices. It should have been up for Production Design and Cinematography, arguably for Makeup and Hairstyling as well. It is a beautiful movie, visually, considered by many the best film adaptation of the novel to date. For his 1975 film Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick strove to ensure every frame looked like a 19th century painting. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is no different. Its framing is picturesque. Everything from the way characters look to where they’re standing to how the camera is angled makes the scenes resemble oil paintings one might find in a museum. A large part of the character in Gerwig’s Little Women comes from how the story is told visually, but the Oscars failed to recognize this.
The Problem Hollywood Has With Female Directors
The most conspicuous Oscar snub for Little Women was its lack of nomination for Directing. Gerwig took a movie that has now been adapted for the silver screen seven times and presented a fresh take. The movie has modern overtones without losing its placement in a specific time period; it brings to life the characters and scenes from the original novel in way that captures its timelessness. The Oscar Awards have been around for 92 years. In that time, only five women have ever been nominated for Best Director, and only one has ever won: Katheryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. The 2015 controversy #OscarsSoWhite critiqued the Academy’s all-white acting nominations, speaking to the wider problem across Hollywood of a lack of diversity and representation in movies, both behind-the-scenes and onscreen.
The prestige of award ceremonies like the Oscars provide an opportunity to give underserved voices a platform. So far, they have failed Greta Gerwig. Her 2017 movie Lady Bird was nominated for five awards, including Directing, but went home with no wins. It has a higher audience and critic score on Rotten Tomatoes than that year’s winner, The Shape Of Water. The same goes for Little Women. It received better audience and critical reception than many of the films that did secure a Directing nomination this year.
In Gerwig’s film, Jo publishing her novel matches Little Women’s publication history. Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), the man with the power to disseminate the book, discounts its merits until it is put under the gaze of his daughters. An addition by Gerwig, it speaks to a wider society problem. Although Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was wildly popular on publication, it has slowly dropped off the reading list in schools across America. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women captures the magic and timelessness of its source material, but the Oscars alongside other film award authorities are doing their best to ensure it follows in the footsteps of the novel: a beloved classic that falls into unrewarded obscurity.