One of the Academy Award frontrunners is “ Boyhood ,” a semi-autobiographical movie directed by Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused”) about growing up in Texas. It was shot a few days at a time over a dozen years, with the cast aging naturally.

It’s a cute concept and a nice movie, even if one lacking in incident. If I were running “Boyhood’s” PR campaign, I would get more people to write articles denouncing “Boyhood” for being about a white boy. The movie seems most interesting when it’s being attacked for what it is.

For example, from the Wall Street Journal:

What ‘Boyhood’ Shows Us About Girlhood In Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated movie, a boy grows independent even as his sister loses her self-confidence By SHARON MARCUS and ANNE SKOMOROWSKY Updated Feb. 6, 2015 4:33 p.m. ET The Oscars are coming, and Richard Linklater ’s “Boyhood,” already a critical favorite, is a contender for many of the big awards. As the title declares, the film is very much a boy’s coming-of-age story, but “Boyhood” is also about girlhood. Mason has a sister, Samantha, who grows up alongside him over the course of the 12 years it took to make the film.

For the first half of the film, as Mason dreams, Samantha competes with him. She dominates, teases and outperforms her younger brother (in reality, the actors playing the brother and sister were born only months apart). When Samantha first appears, she whizzes by Mason on her bike, calling him home for dinner. She taunts him by singing a Britney Spears song, speaking pig Latin and reminding him that he flunked first grade. Even in early adolescence, Samantha remains outspoken, challenging her controlling stepfather about the pointlessness of dusting, worrying about her stepsiblings when he turns abusive and her mother flees the house. But in the film’s last hour, Samantha starts to fade. Her speech and voice start to disintegrate audibly: She speaks less, signals uncertainty with the constant use of the filler phrase “I mean” and punctuates many of her statements with a nervous laugh. At Mason’s high school graduation party, she makes a toast only after being prompted to do so. By contrast, as Mason gets older, he speaks in a loud, deep voice and expresses himself in well-formed sentences, unhampered by nervous tics and distracting phrases. The teenage Mason is full of ideas and grows in confidence with every passing year. What explains these differences in their development?

Linklater cast his daughter as the boy’s older sister. Not surprisingly, at a very young age, Miss Linklater is already quite an entertainer. Initially, she distractingly overshadows the handsome little boy cast as the title character. As the years go by, however, the boy matures as an actor and can carry more of Linklater’s autobiographical movie.Hormones?

Wrong!