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Why Little Women should win the best picture Oscar

Greta Gerwig’s remake of the classic is a clever balance of staying true to Louisa May Alcott and updating her feminism

  • This article contains spoilers

Greta Gerwig embarked upon her remake of Little Women with fanatical attention to detail. She took the cast on tours of Louisa May Alcott’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, and wangled the budget to shoot the film nearby. She gave her actors extracurricular reading to get into character. She even had Alcott’s and her own birth charts compared (Gerwig is probably the only director who could say something so wafty and not make me pull a muscle rolling my eyes).

Clearly, she had also anticipated the resistance that her Little Women would engender: a film about women’s domestic lives remade at a time when it seems as if the greatest accolade available to female directors and actors is helming a superhero movie and proving they can play with the boys. It’s there in the first scene of her reordered adaptation: the adult Jo March (Saoirse Ronan, now 25, in what may prove to be her last great girlhood role) stands off against a publisher who scoffs at her “moral” stories and rewrites one to enhance its commercial viability.

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