Movies about teen girls don’t often win Best Picture. Can Lady Bird?

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominates between five and 10 movies to compete for the Oscars’ Best Picture trophy — its most prestigious award, and the one given out at the very end of the night. What “best picture” really means is a little fuzzy, but the most accurate way of characterizing it might be that it indicates how Hollywood wants to remember the past year in film.

The Best Picture winner, in other words, is the movie that represents the film industry in America, what it’s capable of, and how it sees itself at a specific point in time.

When we look at the nominee slate for any given year, we’re essentially looking at a list of possibilities for the way Hollywood will characterize the previous 12 months in film. And one thing that’s true about the nine Best Picture nominees from 2017 is that they exhibit a lot of variety.

There are genre films and art films, horror films and history films, romances and tragicomedies. And thinking about what the Academy voters — as well as audiences and critics — found enticing about them helps us better understand both Hollywood and what we were looking for at the movies more broadly this year.

In the runup to the Oscars, Vox’s culture staff decided to take a look at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What made this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

In this installment, we talk about Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which stars Saoirse Ronan as a high school senior living “on the wrong side of the tracks” with her family in Sacramento as she finishes her final year at a Catholic girls’ high school. The film is a critical darling and a commercial success, and it’s an unusual choice for the Best Picture category; below, we dig into why.

Alissa Wilkinson: Ahh, Lady Bird. My favorite film of the year.

I confess that I was not expecting much from this movie, largely because I had slotted it into the mental genre of “movies directed by actors.” Certainly actors can direct movies well, but often they’re mediocre, and they seem to show up a lot at film festivals. So when I saw that Greta Gerwig had written and directed it, I kept my expectations foolishly low for my first viewing in Toronto last fall.

But Lady Bird was a delight from start to finish — so good, in fact, that I went back to see it twice before reviewing it, just to make sure it was as good as I thought it was. And it is. It’s deceptively simple, a comedy with serious pathos about a teenage girl and her mother. Teen girls have made terrific subjects for movies lately (I’m thinking of The Edge of Seventeen, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Eighth Grade, which premiered at Sundance in January), but there’s still a persistent bias against the idea that serious filmmaking would center on teen girls.

And yet this is a serious film — when I watched it the second and third time, I was largely struck by the editing, of all things — with a screenplay that has all kinds of things going on beneath its surface and outstanding performances from the whole cast, including both Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf and other supporting players (my own favorites are Tracy Letts as Lady Bird’s dad and Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, but I could go on forever — Lois Smith!).

So what did you two think about the movie? What’s attracted awards voters to it? And how do you think its subject, a girl who’s a senior in high school trying to find her way in the world, has shaped the conversation around it?

Constance Grady: Lady Bird has an interesting companion in “Cat Person,” the New Yorker short story that lit up Twitter when it came out last December. In large part, the outcry over “Cat Person” came because it’s about a young woman, and it still feels novel when young women are allowed to be the objects of serious literary and aesthetic interest in the way that young men get to be in your Catcher in the Ryes and your Boyhoods.

One of Lady Bird’s most beautiful ideas is that to pay close attention to something is an act of love, and it’s surprisingly moving to see the kind of close, loving attention that the movie celebrates applied to the life of a teenage girl. There’s enormous affection in the way the camera pans over Lady Bird’s pink-painted bedroom walls and notices her acne scars and the doodles on the cast of her arm: It’s a quiet celebration of details that are often effaced or ignored, and that makes it feel aesthetically fresh.

But it’s also worth noting that those kinds of details do get celebrated in media that’s not taken as seriously as Lady Bird is. Zan Romanoff has argued at the Paris Review that the shelves of the YA section of every bookstore “are piled high and bright with novels written by people — many of us women — who care deeply about how and why we tell the stories of teenage girlhood.” There are also plenty of teen TV shows and teen movies out there that are interested in paying close attention to what it feels like to be a teenage girl.

Do you think Lady Bird is doing something different from those stories? What makes this depiction of teenage girlhood unique?

Caroline Framke: Besides for being the only one to give me a visceral flashback by using Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” at an intimidating high school party? Let’s see...

Honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Lady Bird — especially as played by the truly spectacular Saiorse Ronan — is a completely believable teenager in a few key ways. First, she is smart and funny and creative, but not supernaturally so. She’s not a genius or even especially quick-witted, but she can still whip out a sharp line every now and then.

Even more realistically, those moments tend to happen when she isn’t even trying. In fact, the times when she does try to be witty and totally fails — like when she responds to an aloof boy saying he wouldn’t snitch on her with “I hope not, because I’d fucking kill your family” — are even more hilarious because they’re so painfully accurate. (On that note: Ronan has much better comic timing than many are giving her credit for, despite how much credit she’s getting in general for this performance.)

In particular, this movie’s treatment of her sporadically volcanic teen girl fury is spot-on in a way I haven’t seen all too often. Edge of Seventeen (which I loved!) had its moments, but Lady Bird sharpens its own into precise, often devastating points. When Lady Bird’s frustration starts to boil over, it’s palpable in every frame — and as anyone who has been a teen girl or has been on the receiving end of a teen girl’s wrath can tell you, it’s appropriately terrifying.

While I do think a lot of this has to do with Ronan’s bruising, compassionate portrayal — can you tell I’m in the tank for her to win Best Actress? — I also think the reason Lady Bird’s depiction of teenagehood resonates so hard is because Lady Bird isn’t the only teenager it nails.

Every supporting teen — from Feldstein’s enthusiastic Julie to Timothée Chalamet’s pretentious Kyle to Lucas Hedges’s earnest Danny — feels authentic, which in turn makes Lady Bird’s relationship with each feel that much more realistic. She’s not just an island unto herself as some paragon of misunderstood brilliance. She’s a teenager with bigger dreams than she can often handle, and it affects her and the people around her in recognizably messy ways.

But if we’re going to talk about Lady Bird as a gorgeously rendered movie about what it’s like to be a teenager, we have to talk about the one character who so perfectly puts Lady Bird herself into context: Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Marion. I’ve rambled long enough, so Alissa, please tell us why Metcalf is so good and why she deserves the world (and Alison Janney’s awards), please.

Alissa: Explaining why Metcalf is great is like explaining why chocolate is great. It just is.

But I think what is so marvelous about Metcalf’s performance is how she makes a complex and potentially confusing character into one that is, by the end, deeply sympathetic. I’m sure I’m not the only person who watched Lady Bird and found myself veering back and forth between wanting to scream at her character and wanting to give her a hug.

That’s obviously by design; we’re in Lady Bird’s shoes, and that is exactly how she feels about her mother (and how many of us have felt about our own mothers, I’d wager). I think, though, that it’s relatively rare to find a character like that who is a middle-aged woman in a supporting role. Roles for women are much more frequently one-note, in my experience. (And that’s true of Janney’s character in I, Tonya, which is not her fault, but does give her, ultimately, less to work with.)

When I saw Metcalf in Lady Bird, I’d just seen her on Broadway in A Doll’s House, Part 2, for which she won a Tony. (She is having a good year.) In that play, she has a similar role: a woman who is sympathetic, but only to a point; her behavior leads us to want to judge her, but the core of who she is pulls us in another direction entirely.

I’m no actor, but I feel it must be very hard to inhabit that kind of role and give the impression that these two things can coexist in the same person without questioning her authenticity or sanity. I love her performance, and I love it more every time I watch it.

I think that’s what compels me about the whole film — it’s evidence of very careful observation of characters, places, and actions on Gerwig’s part, and it also asks you to pay close attention to understand what’s happening. There’s such care in the way she writes every character; I think, for instance, of the priest and drama instructor played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, who has a small number of lines but an arc that’s filled with pathos.

Someone asked me why he was in the movie, and all I could reply was that his smaller narrative is the kind of thing that could happen that would affect a high school senior in ways she might not recognize for years. The film is filled with minor details and supporting characters that do the same for Lady Bird.

Were there any details or minor characters that particularly stuck out for you, and why?

Constance: There is a whole world of unspoken backstory packed into Lady Bird’s brother Miguel and his girlfriend, who live with the family in their tiny house. Like Henderson’s drama teacher, Miguel has few lines, but there’s a moment toward the end of the movie where he runs into his father interviewing for the same job, and in their faces you can see a whole history of striving and unrealized dreams and ambitions playing out all at once.

One of the lovely things about all these minor characters with their rich, complex stories is that they allow us to watch Lady Bird’s world while understanding it better than she does in the moment. As the movie begins, she’s caught up in all the intoxicating self-absorption that comes with being a teenager, and it leaves her unable to fully register the people around her as human beings with their own feelings and tragedies outside of brief, fleeting glances.

Caroline: Since I’ve already sung the praises of Lady Bird’s Greek chorus of teens, I’ll only briefly mention how perfect Kyle’s bored promise that Lady Bird will have “so much un-special sex in [her] life” is (so perfect) on my way to singing the praises of SISTER SARAH JOAN (Smith), who is the best.

She only has a few small scenes, but it’s still hard for me to pick a favorite moment of hers. But I think it’s a tie between her revealing that the prom theme finalists are “Cities of the World, Eternal Flame, and Movies” (a great joke) and her laughing that Lady Bird putting “Just Married to Jesus” cans on her car was, in fact, pretty funny.

Her firm but kind way of dealing with Lady Bird’s spates of rebellion is a really good example of what Alissa was talking about with the priest. Lady Bird — or, as she calls herself by the end of the movie, Christine — will likely remember her office chats with Sister Sarah Joan, especially the one in which she gently tells Lady Bird it sure seems like she loves Sacramento, for a long time beyond high school.

Alissa: There’s so much richness in this film to appreciate, and it’s endlessly quotable and meme-able. But when people mention the film in five or 10 years, what will you remember? What sticks with you most about Lady Bird?

Constance: The moment that hit me most in the gut is when Lady Bird and her mother are shopping for dresses. They’re sorting through the dress rack at a thrift store and fighting in the way they do for most of the film, about how Lady Bird is a disappointment and about her mother doesn’t understand her — and then they break off mid-sentence to exclaim over finding the perfect dress. “Oh, it’s perfect!” says Lady Bird. “Do you love it?” says Marion.

What’s most affecting about the scene for me is the easy, lived-in rhythm of it, and the way it captures how you can have a fight with your parents for so much of your adolescence that it becomes background noise, barely noticeable and easily set aside at any given moment.

Caroline: There’s just no way I can leave this roundtable without mentioning Hedges’s extraordinary work in the scene where Danny, broken and scared after Lady Bird caught him kissing another boy, pleads with her to not tell anyone before he’s ready.

It would be notable on its own even if only for that moment, because his performance really is that good. But the scene elevates to a whole new level of great when Lady Bird drops her determination to be angry and comforts him.

Not only do Ronan and Hedges play this moment perfectly, but it’s yet another example of Gerwig’s script following up on a moment that many other movies would have left alone. Lady Bird’s shocked horror at realizing her boyfriend is gay easily could have been the end of it, a ridiculous anecdote to share with her friends at college.

But Gerwig is so good about giving every character an arc that she doesn’t entirely dismiss the very real connection between Danny and Lady Bird. Instead, she gives Danny this moment to be terrified about both being forced out of the closet and possibly losing a great friend — and in turn, gives Lady Bird a moment to reconsider her knee-jerk anger.

Here, Lady Bird realizes that her friend’s pain is more significant than hers and requires real compassion, which Danny gratefully accepts as he collapses into her arms. It’s just a gorgeous, empathetic scene, and I won’t soon forget it.

Alissa: Gerwig and I are almost the exact same age, and Lady Bird [would now be] a year younger than me, and so the thing I will never, ever forget is the way Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” is used in this film. Officially we’re all supposed to hate the song; this film revealed how many of us secretly kind of love it.

Which is so great, because that is exactly what happens in the movie. Lady Bird’s big moment of realization (or one of them, anyhow) comes when she decides she can admit she loves the song, even though her cool semi-friends “hate” it.

I’d like to believe I am finally old enough to admit when I love a song that I’m supposed to hate and feel totally fine about it. But even just talking about that musical cue with others reminded me that I am not quite as cool as I think I am, and it gave me a new appreciation for Lady Bird herself, and for what this movie manages to pull off — it’s about becoming yourself, about love, about paying attention to who you are and where you’re from.

It’s about becoming the next version of yourself, and remembering that you never quite lose who you were. I think it will be with us for a long time.

Check out what our critics roundtable had to say about all nine Best Picture nominees:

Call Me By Your Name | Darkest Hour | Dunkirk | Get Out | Lady Bird | Phantom Thread | The Post | The Shape of Water | Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri