Meryl Streep's Feminist Tribute to Emma Thompson

The New Yorker: Forget the Oscars. We already have a winner for best award-show speech of the season, and it’s a tie: Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. On Tuesday night, at the National Board of Review gala, Streep, whose speeches are perfect, delivered a humdinger of a tribute to Emma Thompson, who was receiving the best-actress honor, for “Saving Mr. Banks.” (The ceremony was untelevised, but Bennett Marcus, at Vanity Fair, provided a transcript.) With her customary self-satirizing loopiness, Streep took the stage wearing a “Prize Winner” hat (swag from the producers of “Nebraska”) and remarked, “What? Oh, I’m not the prize winner. That’s so weird.” By the end, she was lionizing Thompson in verse—because Meryl Streep writes poetry—in “an ode to Emma”