Spike Jonze, the director of Her, landed his first Oscar on Sunday at the Academy Awards, beating out some pretty hefty competition including Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Nebraska and American Hustle for Best Original Screenplay.
This marks Jonze's first Oscar and adds a particular distinction to the history of the Academy Awards in that it celebrates the notion of a human relationship with a machine.
[seealso slug="her-singularity"]
Usually the Academy bestows the award upon a film that is solely focused on the heartbreaks and triumphs of intimate human relationships, largely staying away from science fiction fare.
To find a winner in this category with such a similarly odd premise you'd have to look all the way back to 1956, when French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse won for The Red Balloon, a film about a child who strikes up a relationship with a sentient balloon.
In interviews, Jonze has largely avoided the topic of technology, opting instead to focus on the relationship angle of the film.
Spike Jonze answered my ? about the future in Her - It was an abstraction, meant to heighten the emerging themes of our own time.— Jeff Petriello (¬‿¬) (@thebeff) March 3, 2014
But this win proves that Jonze's screenplay, a work that is so natively 21st century in nearly every respect, resonated with audiences in a way that will move many to take another look at the sci-fi film and its increasingly real premise.
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