Oscars 2015: Best Picture Reviews - Boyhood

I want to be clear about something. There is a huge difference between a gimmick and a risk. There's a lot of animosity towards Boyhood right now because it's getting such rave reviews and critics are saying people are just being suckered by its gimmick. However, this film easily deserves every bit of praise it has earned. It's currently the first film in nearly 15 years to have a 100% on Metacritic. Although that doesn't necessarily mean much, it's evident that people are impressed by something more than the fact that the film took 12 years to make.

This is the story of a boy, Mason, from the age of 5 until he turns 18 and heads off to college. Director Richard Linklater could have easily used several actors to play Mason at varying ages and used makeup on parents Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette to show aging. It's done all the time. However, he instead decided to find a five-year-old actor, invest in his life, and shoot footage every year for 12 years. The risk is phenomenal. What if the actor, Ellar Coltrane, went through some kind of weird puberty and suddenly couldn't act? What if he didn't want to? What if something terrible happened to him, or Linklater, or any of the film's stars? What if the money ran out? There are so many reasons no one does this when making a movie, and so many reasons why it's incredible that the film turned out the way it did.