And finally we come to the film that most deserved to be on Oscar's Best Picture lineup: Frances Ha. Unlike The Wind Rises, which wasn't aggressively heralded by too many critics group, Frances Ha has had its vocal supporters since the film debuted nearly a year and a half ago at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. Name checked by the likes of Sight and Sound and director Quentin Tarantino as one of the best films of 2013, and receiving a Golden Globe nomination for Greta Gerwig's performance as the titular Frances, the film has gotten a bit of awards traction here and there. Unfortunately though, from the get go, it was clear Frances Ha was never going to be a movie the Academy warmed to. Directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written by Baumbach and the film's star, Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha, shot (technically converted) in beautiful black-and-white, tells the story of Frances, a directionless young New Yorker in her late-20's who is struggling to find her place in the world. Finding safety and meaning in the world only through her friends, particularly her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), Frances kind of, sort of wants to be a dancer and has been half-heartedly trying to make it in a dance company for a couple of years. As friends start finally growing up, becoming "actual people" in the world, Frances is left struggling behind, bouncing from apartment to apartment, address to address, as she tries to find others her age who aren't ready to grow up yet. While films like the previously mentioned Spring Breakers and The Wolf of Wall Street capture the more sexy narrative of the widespread corruption and greed that permeates our contemporary society, it's Frances Ha that captures the current zeitgeist better than any film yet. Specifically, in terms of capturing the Millennial generation, no film has been more accurate in its portrayal of the hopes and insecurities of a group of budding young adults. Frances, as many her age, has lived a sheltered existence, admiring from below, as a child, the accomplishments of the real people, the adults, who she can't contemplate actually replicating. What makes the film work so well on a human level though, is even as the film critique's the flaws of Frances' character, it does so empathetically, never simply playing a situation for awkward laughs. Above all though, the reason France Ha ranks ahead of all the movies of 2013 is that the film is an expression of pure cinema. With its use of scores from the film's of Francois Truffaut (and Frances Ha very much has the feeling of a 21 Century The 400 Blows), its obvious allusions to Woody Allen's classic film Manhattan, and its relation to the previous work of Noah Baumbach, Frances Ha has cinema in the very essence of its DNA. The film makes excellent use of licensed music as well (a phenomenon total specific to the art of cinema) with inclusions of T. Rex's Chrome Star, Hot Chocolate's Every 1's a Winner, and Harry Nilsson's Mrs. Butter's Lament. And in all honesty, as soon as Frances ran through the streets to the sounds of David Bowie's Modern Love, it was going to be hard for any film other than Frances Ha to rank on top of this list.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
