Her (2013)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Production Design, and Best Original Screenplay    Every once in a while, the Academy picks a nominee for Best Picture that presents an idea so novel you just can't help talking about it.  It forces you to consider thoughts you held about a subject and challenges your perceptions.  That's probably why it will lose the statue but this is the first Best Picture nominee of the year that actually made me remember that motion pictures are an art form, and art is meant to provoke.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is going through a rough time.  He is trying to move on from his last relationship but isn't ready to sign his divorce papers.  He's lonely, withdrawn, and depressed.  Then he sees an ad for an AI personal assistant that promises a fully-formed artificial consciousness tailor-made to his specifications.  Her name is Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).  Initially just looking for novelty, Theodore soon finds that Samantha is integral to his life.  She is bright, bubbly, helpful, and sees the world through a fresh pair of eyes.  Soon enough, in fact, Theodore starts to fall in love but telling people you are dating an OS is the definition of "it's complicated".

This movie is so much more than some dude in love with a phone.  It highlights emotional reality, i.e. can emotions be genuine if they are not shared with another human.  Do you need a body to have a relationship?  Of course not.  Enough people date online to make that an easy pill to swallow.

For me, the main point of this movie was how willing we are to limit our love.  It is exceptionally difficult to know that your partner has completely outgrown you, has evolved without you into a totally different class of consciousness.  We prune our love down to an amount we're comfortable with, instead of encouraging it to grow and encompass the whole world.  Maybe then love wouldn't be something anxiously awaited and jealously guarded as if it only came around once in a lifetime.

So, after all that, let me ruin everything and say that I didn't actually like this movie.  I loved the ideas it brings up but the movie itself is slow with a color palette that needed anti-depressants, and irritating characters, especially Theodore Twombly.  What a sad sack.  The vision of the near-future is pretty neat, though.  Best Picture?  No.  Best Score or Song?  No.  Production Design is a maybe, but I would definitely pick it for Best Original Screenplay right now.