Technological opulence juxtaposes the beauty of human interdependency in Spike Jonze’s film “Her.” 

Joaquin Phoenix portrays a man caught in a quixotic relationship with his operating system. The film draws a fine line between harrowing and poignant. Jonze forces his audience to watch a man spiral into deprecating loneliness, and, while many films would shy from the self-actualization of loneliness, Jonze forces his audience to face solidarity in all its pathetically-honest emotion. 

“Her” stands out on a ballot of historical pieces and screenwriters lost in time machines who focus on magnifying the past yet are mindless to the calamitous possibilities technology holds for future generations’ interconnectivity. In a bijou apartment in futuristic America, Phoenix reveals the necessity of relationships. Jonze poses idealism against reality and asks society to take an in-depth look at where civilization is headed, one megabyte at a time. 

“Her” deserves the Oscar because it is not merely a film. It is not a strict historical document with groundbreaking film techniques and an actor who portrays chronology in technicolor brilliance. No, “Her” deserves the Oscar because it is a call-to-action for a generation too buried in its idealism, eyes bored into iPhones, to look up and engage in a reality so raw and chaotic, and yet so grounded in a beauty too refined to display on a retina screen and manages to capture the idealistic struggle in all of its pragmatic glory.