Why Boyhood Is the Most Deserving Awards Candidate This Year

It's in a category of its own.

With the announcement of the Golden Globe nominations this morning, we have now officially entered that part of the year in culture when Hollywood stops making art and starts judging it. It can be fun in its way: How badly will the Academy screw up this year? Who gets snubbed and why? What makes one movie better than another? Unfortunately, all of those discussions this year are irrelevant. There were many excellent films this year, but one is so far above the rest that it renders the debate beside the point: 2014 was the year Boyhood came out.

Boyhood is more than just a better film than the others; its brilliance is just different from the other films' brilliance. The uniqueness of its structure—being shot over the course of 12 years in three-day increments once a year—gives it its own reality. How can the performance of any actress this year compare to Patricia Arquette's as the struggling, triumphant single mom? The other actresses didn't have anywhere near the canvas for exploring the development of a character. Literally, her body changes, year to year, the way a person's body changes. No extreme acting effort could mimic those body transformations, which are of course part of daily life. Arquette doesn't have to mimic them. The suspense of the movie is unlike the suspense of any other—what will the kid look like next year? It's a suspense that is less like that of a film and closer to that of real life.

The frame of Boyhood is a gimmick. But that gimmick—charting the physical, mental, emotional changes over the course of 12 years—is surprisingly powerful. The story's range of subjects is vastly broad: It's a movie about boyhood and the beauty and terror of that period in life, but incidentally it becomes a fascinating meditation on the imperfections of parenting, the nature of a particular place (Texas), the education system, adolescent risk, and above all the nature of time. It also has the most convincing portrait of an alcoholic ever put on screen. For a film about the gritty minutiae of everyday life, its ambitions are immense. The fact that its ambition is set against such everyday struggles only makes the ambition that much bolder. A mini-doc on Hulu about the making of Boyhood is fascinating in its own right.

Boyhood won four awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, including best picture and best director, and it has been nominated for all the important Golden Globes as well. So Boyhood is already out front in the struggle for critical dominance over the next two months. But in Boyhood's case, all the praise that's no doubt coming seems almost beside the point. Boyhood is not just an original story with original characters, it's an original film. No other film has worked this way and no other film will ever work this way again. It's a one-off with a deep insight into the human condition. It is an 11 out of 10. It is not on the spectrum on which all the other movies fall. It has made its own spectrum. It's not competing with the other movies. It's playing a different game.

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