HAVING only just watched the film Boyhood, since it came out on DVD, I was rooting for Patricia Arquette to win best supporting actress in the Oscars.

The film, about a young boy growing up from the age of six to his 19th birthday, could just as well be called Motherhood.  For Arquette brilliantly captures the bittersweet experience all parents go through as they watch their sons’ and daughters’ childhoods flash before them in the blink of an eye.

Busy working, running a home and raising her children, time creeps up on her, catching her unawares. “This is the worst day of my life,” she cries towards the end of the film, as her son packs up to leave for college.

The movie, filmed a few days every year over 12 years, shows all the actors ageing in real time. While the adults change in more subtle ways, the children’s transformation, over the space of just two and three quarter hours, is startling.

We witness six-year-old Mason develop from a chubby faced, cherubic looking six year old, through the gawky awkwardness of adolescence to a tall, lanky, stubbly and angular jawed adult.

It makes me think of our old family videos, which the boys dug out and watched over and over again, during the Christmas holidays.

Just like the film Boyhood, they show time passing by as we drift in and out of fragmented moments from everyday family life.

I don’t bother filming any more, now that everyone can capture things so easily on their mobile phones. But I used to get the video camera out every Christmas, on occasional birthdays and during a few of our summer holidays.

I deliberately taped no more than five minutes on each occasion, as I knew no one would want to watch reams of dull footage in years to come. So the films tend to jump from roughly one four or five month period to the next.

Watching the boys on these tapes now, I can see their limbs stretching, hairstyles changing and noses and jaws lengthening in front of my eyes.

Like half-remembered, dreamlike sequences, so much happens in an instant: “There’s five-day old Albert in his Moses basket the day he got home from hospital. Look, he’s crawling now. That’s him, running about in the garden. And doesn’t he look proud of himself, wearing his new school uniform?”

Birthday candles mark the passing of the years, the flames extinguished in a few puffs, like the days, weeks, months and years now long gone.

Just as in Boyhood, where we watch Mason riding his bike, playing video games and fighting with his sister, there isn’t a dramatic storyline. It’s a snapshot of ordinary home life.  But, in the midst of all this ordinariness, time is slipping by. 

While wonderful and heart-warming to watch, that’s what makes these home videos so sad too. The little boys we watch on screen are gone. While I can see flickers of the child inside all my sons still, what we have been looking at are the ghosts of their former selves.

In Boyhood, Arquette finds it difficult to cope with her son leaving home. She realises, with a shock, how time has been slipping through her fingers, evading her grasp: “You know what I’m realising? My life is going to go. Like that,” she says.

She lists a series of milestones, from getting married and having children to getting divorced, studying for qualifications, bagging her dream job: “And that time we thought you were dyslexic, when I taught you how to ride a bike, sending you off to college...”

She is only partly joking when she declares that her funeral will be one of the next things on the list. For this film shines a harsh spotlight on the terrifying truth that life is short.

At the beginning of the film, Arquette, as the mother, Olivia, plays a pivotal role in her children’s lives and is very much at the centre of the film. She is the one making the decisions, shaping the future, she is in charge.

But now she finds herself edged to the side lines. Mason and his sister have moved to the centre, taking the lead, and she is peripheral to the story.

The truly, gut-wrenching moment comes when Arquette, who started filming when she was 33 and is 45 by the end, sobs: “Is that all there is? I thought there would be more.”

An Oscar-winning performance if ever I saw one. And almost as moving as our own home videos. Almost, but not quite…