LOS ANGELES -- Boyhood is available to rent for $5.99 via on-demand cable, consoles and online platforms starting Tuesday, so now you really have no excuse not to catch the Oscar front-runner.
It's long -- 2 hours, 45 minutes to be exact -- so you'll want to get an early start and maybe put a kettle on. But Richard Linklater's family epic, filmed over 12 years with the same cast, would be worth seeing even if there were no such thing as the Academy Awards. (It's also worth a Blu-ray copy, which goes on sale Tuesday as well).
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/boyhood.inside.art_.jpg" caption=""Boyhood" is now available to rent on cable VOD, consoles and online for $5.99." credit="Mashable/Josh Dickey" alt="boyhood.inside.art"]
The Hollywood trade publications that depend on glitzy, expensive awards-season "for your consideration" ads have been writing for weeks that there is no clear Oscar best picture front-runner -- to call the race now would be shooting themselves in the bottom line, why do that? -- but make no mistake. Boyhood is sitting pretty.
On Goldderby.com, which aggregates the opinions of Oscar pundits, Boyhood is the No. 1 best picture choice for 19 of the 26 "experts." Of the seven dissenters, it is the No. 2 choice for all but one -- Variety's Jenelle Riley, who puts it at No. 3 (Variety sells a lot of those ads).
Anyway, Boyhood has won more than a dozen major film critics' awards, is nominated in almost every major category across multiple guilds and is surely picking up hardware at the Golden Globe Awards this coming Sunday. Tell us again how this race is wide open?
The film has been around for almost a year after debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, and with the Globes coming up in just a few days, the time to check it out is now.