Ladybird

My personal favourite in the Oscar race, Ladybird is a homage to every time you've felt misunderstood.

Greta Gerwig is only the fifth woman ever to be nominated for best director in the Oscars, and it seems fitting thing she's nominated for the most generalised experience in human history- being a teenage girl. In Ladybird, Saiorse Ronan plays a dip-dyed 17 year old with something to prove. She feels dissatisfied by her home town, her parents, her appearance and her intelligence. She believes that the world revolves around her and that it has forgotten her, simultaneously, resulting in the most perfect depiction of adolescence since The Breakfast Club. However this is an Oscar nominated (fingers crossed winning) film because this depiction appreciates that these emotions transcend our teenage years, and continue far past the moment we turn 18. 

The plot feels rather generic, however in typical A24 style it isn't the plot that draws you, but the characters and Greta Gerwig's incredible style. The episodic form consists of short scenes which abruptly (but not unpleasantly) lead into one another, developed enough that you follow the events but brief enough that it reflects the way in which emotions rise and fall at that age. While Ladybird feels carelessly thrown between the men, events and classes of her life, we too are whisked from one moment to the other without a chance to process. Yet, at no point did I feel dissatisfied. 

Despite the film's title signifying towards a single character, the supporting characters feel like much more than bolsters to Ladybird's narrative. Each character reaches out to the audience in different ways. Whether you are a father struggling with a daughter like Ladybird, or a mother who just wants to throttle her. Or, my personal favourite, the best friend who just wants their other half to be content with life, while they bounce from boy to boy searching for the respect you have given them their entire lives. It's heart-breaking. But so amazing.

Greta Gerwig has completely mastered the ability to make you cry one moment and laugh the next. Insignificant events in Ladybird's life are depicted with the weight that they have to a 17 year old girl, simultaneously portraying the pain of a mother to not be able to relate to these events anymore. Gerwig's script finds the pain that adolescence can bring to all of us, whether you are a participant or an onlooker. And that is why I think this surpasses The Breakfast Club, because it removes the disparity between adults and children which the 80s obsessed over. Ladybird instead, bridges that gap by appreciating we are always learning in that adolescent, newly out of high school way.