Oscars 2014: If We Picked The Nominees (Best Picture)

9. Spring Breakers

No matter what your feelings on Harmony Kornine's divisive film are, you at least have to give Spring Breakers props for tricking uninformed, vapid teenagers and young twenty-somethings into seeing an art film. Advertised to the MTV crowd as a rah-rah celebration of the ritualistic excesses of collegiate spring migration, and starring two familiar faces of their youth in Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, aesthetically, Spring Breakers was anything but just another teen movie. This was not The Hangover, this was not American Pie, and there were certainly no super heroes (although an Alien plays a pretty prominent role), and if you scoured Twitter around the time the film came out, you would have seen a myriad of hilariously angry responses to the film because it lacked any comforting similarities to these films and genres. Beyond the simple pleasures of pulling off a great prank, Spring Breakers is an amazing film in its own right. Another entry in the encouragingly growing "montage as movie" genre (To the Wonder and Upstream Color being two other 2013 releases that would qualify for this classification), if you have yet to see the film, Spring Breakers can roughly be approximated as, "Terrence Malick goes on Spring Break". The film follows a quartet of hedonistic college girls who would do anything (and pretty much do anything) just to get a taste of the mindless euphoria of Spring Break. Once they arrive at their destination, they let all their inhibitions go, which predictably gets the girls in a spot of trouble. From there the girls meet up with a rapper/entertainer, going by the name of Alien (played to brilliant effect by James Franco in what is probably the best performance of his career to date), who brings them down a whole new dark hole that proves to be too much for the most conscientious of the girls (Selena Gomez's character) and brings out the more sociopathic tendencies in some of the other girls. Scored to the music genre craze of the moment, dubstep, the film is about as zeitgeist-y as it gets. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Spring Breakers walks the fine line between glorification and condemnation, which is exactly what makes the film so powerful. Displaying the quotient that some in the Millennial generation have for unabashed materialism and hedonism, the film is a fantastic critique of the direction that 21st Century morality appears to be taking. While definitely not up everyone's alley, Spring Breakers is one the boldest, and most self-assured cinematic statements made in 2013. And simply for Franco's performance alone, this is a movie that will be remembered for some time.