‘Lady Bird’ deserves (but won’t win) Oscars
Spoiler alert! The following contains plot points from the Oscar-nominated film Lady Bird.
Lady Bird is one of the bestreviewed movies of all time, by Rotten Tomatoes’ standards: 99% of critics love it.
It’s also likely to go home emptyhanded from Sunday’s Academy Awards, where the beloved film is up for five prizes: best picture, director (Greta Gerwig), actress (Saoirse Ronan), supporting actress (Laurie Metcalf ) and original screenplay (Gerwig).
According to prognosticators on awards site Gold Derby, Lady Bird isn’t a front-runner in any of those categories. In fact, only one of 26 pundits believes it will take best picture, and just two think it can topple Get Out or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Mis
souri for original screenplay. That’s a shame, because this sharply observed, profoundly moving comedy is likely to be one of the only nominees we’ll still remember this time next year. (Looking at you, Darkest Hour.)
For those who haven’t seen it yet — and seriously, what are you waiting for? — Lady Bird charts the year in the life of high-school senior Christine McPherson (Ronan), a precocious, acerbic teenage girl who feels things more intensely than most. She’s so preoccupied by her own pursuits that she turns a blind eye to the everyday struggles of her caring, middle-class parents, Marion (Metcalf ) and Larry (Tracy Letts), and ebullient best friend, Julie (Beanie Feldstein).
In less capable hands, Lady Bird (her self-selected name) could merely come across as bratty or irritating. But Ronan — who at 23, is already a threetime Oscar nominee — manages to be both of those things, while imbuing the character with all sorts of other relatably human shades.
While much has been written about best-actor nominee Timothèe Chalamet‘s gut-wrenching final shot in gay romance Call Me By Your Name, Ronan is equally mesmerizing in Lady Bird‘ s last scene, as Christine calls her mom to thank her for everything she’s done: makeup smudged and severely hungover, but conveying newfound maturity and perspective.
Metcalf, 62, delivers a similarly nuanced performance as Marion, whose well-meaning conversations with her daughter can turn on a dime into verbal sparring matches. No disrespect to supporting actress front-runner Allison Janney — whose scenery-chewing performance in I, Ton
ya stole Metcalf ’s awards momentum — but the latter’s ability to
wordlessly communicate emotion is unparalleled. You see the hurt in her eyes when she learns that Lady Bird told her boyfriend she’s from “the wrong side of the tracks” and feel the inherent love as she watches her daughter sleep.
Of course, the lion’s share of credit for making Lady Bird work goes to Gerwig and her empathetic ability to create a lived-in world. There’s a sense that everyone in Lady Bird’s orbit is living their life just off camera, which sounds simple but is incredibly rare in teen comedies.
Coming off months of hype from critics’ awards and fall festivals, there are those who have complained on social media that the movie is just “average,” and Gerwig was only nominated for best director after the groundswell of support following her Golden Globes snub. But to discredit the film’s success as mere goodwill from the Me Too movement is doing it injustice.
For decades, male filmmakers have been allowed to tell their coming-of-age stories, whether they’re Oscar-embraced dramas such as The Graduate and Boyhood, or raunchy comedies in the vein of American Pie and Superbad. Lady Bird‘ s box-office earnings ($47.3 million; Gerwig made the movie on a $10 million budget) are proof that, if done well, both women and men will come out to see movies from a female perspective, and those experiences can be universal.
Lady Bird may not have the scope of Dunkirk, the audaciousness of The Shape of Water, the urgency of Three Billboards or the social relevance of Get Out. But giving the academy’s top honor to a smallscale female story that completely redefines what can and should be an “awards movie“? As Christine’s tragically hip boyfriend Kyle (Chalamet) might say, that would be a “very baller, very anarchist” move.