No I won’t ‘calm down’ about Greta Gerwig

On my desktop is an unfinished essay, a file called Greta Gerwig Won’t Win. I’ve been trying to write about Gerwig for some time, but I only started this version recently – post-Golden Globes, Oscars rumours simmering. I thought Gerwig would be nominated for directing but have no chance of winning, and I was frustrated about it. In the end, even this was expecting too much: she wasn’t nominated. I’m a bigtime fan of Gerwig: I admire the space she’s made in our culture for stories about women’s lives, and I’m moved by her energy, openheartedness, and attention to detail as a director. Plus I appreciate, immensely, her candour about her hopes and frustrations as a woman filmmaker: asked once, for example, why she cast handsome Louis Garrel as the famously unattractive professor in Little Women, Gerwig pronounced cheerfully, “I feel like men have been putting glasses on hot women forever and telling us they’re awkward. I can do whatever I want.” Barbie, released last summer, was Gerwig’s ambitious third feature: a bright-pink, ensemble-cast, eccentric cinematic feat that broke box-office records. The week the film came out, I was in New York, where women (and sometimes men) wore head-to-toe pink […]