It’s awards season and with awards season comes my favourite night of the year, The Oscars.
It’s the one night a year that truly good movies get talked about, watching the Oscars I don’t have to suffer through stories about Marvel Studio movies or listen to my guy friends talk about how Pirates of the Caribbean deserves all of the awards this season. The Oscars allows me to take my time watching truly great American movies and forget for a moment about all of the atrocities that the world was responsible for this year, because tonight I’m focusing on the good, the positive and the absolute best that the glam and glitz of Hollywood has to offer.

The Shape of Water leads the pack this year, with an impressive 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Guillermo del Toro for Directing, Sally Hawkins for Actress in a Leading Role, Richard Jenkins for Actor in a Supporting Role, and Octavia Spencer for Actress in a Supporting Role, among others.

Dunkirk is up for eight Oscars as well, although most of them are in more technical categories, including Original Score, Sound Mixing, and Cinematography. But it also has a shot at Best Picture, and it marks Christopher Nolan’s first Directing nomination.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri closely follows with seven nods, including Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Actress in a Leading Role for Frances McDormand, and Actor in a Supporting Role for both Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. The film did well at the 75th Golden Globes back in January, but we’ll see if it can translate that early momentum into Oscar wins.

Call Me By Your Name, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, Darkest Hour, and The Post round up the Best Picture nominees and are also expected to put up strong showings tonight.

I had the pleasure of watching most of these amazing flicks this year but one the one I watched curled up in my sick hovel during our extended break from classes in February really resonated with me.
Lady Bird, a beautiful, poignant piece about growing up in a small town and feeling the trappings of it as the catalyst of your whole existence was my absolute favorite film this year.

People have been quick to identify Lady Bird as just another fluff piece by an unknown director looking to branch out from her acting career. I loved it. The movie really channels a new sort of emotion in that weird transitional stage of your senior year, where you branch out and take risks in your life hoping to become more than you once were.

Lady Bird the titular character played by one of my personal Hollywood darlings Saoirse Ronan is played to absolute perfection. The chemistry that Ronan shares with her mother in the movie played by Laurie Matcalf was inspiring to say the least.

When I watched the movie I went into it thinking that the characters in it would be nothing more than manic pixie dream girls, not something that would resonate with my own relationship with my mother.

Lady Bird is a truly thoughtful coming-of-age story about a high school senior named Christine (played by the impeccable Saoirse Ronan), whose headstrong nature and stubborn dedication to pursuing an astonishing life are captured by her demanding everyone call her Lady Bird; a heart-wrenching film about a mother and daughter, two women who love each other deeply, although they may not much like each other much just yet, and the pain they inflict as they test the limits of their strong wills.

What really hit me hard was the question that for me was the driving force of the movie, Lady Bird asks her mother point blank, early on in the film “Do you like me?” to which her mother responds, “Of course I love you.”
Something so simple really weighed on me from the perspective I was watching the movie with, are my decisions, good or bad putting me in the best light in the eyes of my parents? More specifically my mother?

Lady Bird wants to be different, she dyes her hair pink and eats communion crackers as snack and desperately wants to escape the life her family has made for her, a sort of slap in the face of the people that worked their asses off to get her everything she ever wanted.
What struck me as most remarkable about the film is its nuanced, deft handling of social class—a reality teen movies usually address with embellishment or avoid altogether by making their characters white and comfortably upper middle class by default.

This movie is so much more than what I can explain to you just by telling you how I feel about it, it deals with societal issues and talks in detail about Catholic upbringings and relationships it really is a love letter to any teenage girl out there struggling with herself and the world around her that can sometimes feel much too big.

All I can say to anyone reading this right now is this: if you haven’t already seen it, watch Lady Bird. This movie for lack of a better word has changed me for the better and made me look at the relationship I do have, especially the ones that I take for granted every day.
Let Lady Bird teach you about who you are, because she knows exactly what you need.

Thanks Lady Bird…