In the midst of planning Vulture Festival this year, there was one name that we kept coming back to: Laura Dern. We knew we wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate someone whose Emmy-winning role on Big Little Lies served merely as a reminder of what we already knew: Laura Dern absolutely slaps. Maybe that’s not how you’re supposed to use that word, but we don’t care. She does! And sure, we have a trophy budget. But a statue is something you win for just one role, and we wanted to give her something that would truly honor the breadth of her work and its effect on us. Because when we think of Laura Dern, we think of the woman who brought us the sweet ingenue Sandy Williams, the courageous paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler, the furious but fragile Amy Jellicoe, the hard-as-nails divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw, and who is soon to just go right ahead and be Marmee from Little Women. So, instead, we’re bestowing on her Vulture’s first-ever honorary degree. And no, we’re not an accredited institution of higher learning, but that doesn’t mean our honorary degree is any less useful than Harvard’s.
So, dear reader, consider this your invitation to a very special event we’ll be holding to celebrate this moment in pop-culture history this Saturday, November 9, at NeueHouse Madison Square in New York City at 1:15 p.m. Vulture’s E. Alex Jung will be overseeing the festivities as we all gather together to look Laura Dern square in the face and say “Thank you for all you do, and also how do you get your hair to stay like that?â€