Education

There are many Tacit Rules of Oscar awards. One to note within all four Acting Categories is simple: There shalt always be at least one Total Outsider [TO] who hath not a chance in Hell of winning but whose nomination doth demonstrate the artistic integrity and far-seeing range of AMPAS members.

Thus in 2010, acting members will celebrate Sandra Bullock's success at the box office with The Blind Side (and The Proposal). One of her TOs is an ingenue from the UK in a BBC co-production of a very British period piece set in 1962. There's another ingenue this year, an obese black girl playing the title role in Precious. The two other nominees for the 2009 Oscar are past winners who won't be suicidally disturbed by their inevitable failure. Fortunately for Ms Bullock, the black girl doesn't have to win in order to show that Hollywood's so luvably PC and pro-minority, and that's because Bullock's blond-haired character provides semi-maternal TLC for an enormous black sporting hero in his boyhood.

There's another reason the young amateur actress playing Precious is a TO. The older actress playing her mother, a daytime TV minor celebrity called Monique (with an apostrophe somewhere, don't ask why, maybe to give the impression that she does have a family name, of Que) is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress. She's black, ergo the Academy doesn't have to collectively honour another unknown black actress. Ms Apostrophe is, it must be admitted, very good as the evil mother, but that will be no consolation to the four TOs nominated alongside her.

The chances of Carey Mulligan winning the Best Actress award for her fabulous charismatic breakthrough starring role as a 16-year-old schoolgirl in An Education are therefore nil. Minus nil, in fact, because the British film dares to go where no Hollywood movie dare go.

It's bad enough on PC grounds that it depicts a despicably charming Jewish seducer (Peter Sarsgaard with an acceptable accent and a role that finally suits his somewhat spooky eyes). When did anyone last see a despicable Jewish character in a Hollywood movie (and Oliver! doesn't count as it was, of course, a British film). As if that was not unacceptable enough in an era of Defiance and Inglorious Bastards (proper spellings must be preserved whenever possible, ie when they're not a marketing trick), the British movie's scenario includes a handful of snide mildly anti-Jewish remarks from two lead characters (the schoolgirl's self-deluded father, neatly caricatured by Alfred Molina, and her headmistress, a cameo etched starchily by Emma Thompson).

The action's based on the real-life memoir of British journalist Lynn Barber, it's set in the period she deliberately lost her virginity in (1962), and the movie's chances of getting a wide circulation in the USA are almost as TO as Ms Mulligan. (I hope she'll forgive me if she's actually of Irish origin. Nobody's perfect.)

The scenario is a tidy piece of work by Nick Hornby, and the direction is equally clipped. Lone Scherfig is a Danish woman director whose earlier top-rated movies obviously need to be viewed -- Italian For Beginners [2002] and Glasgow-set Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself [2004].

She deftly stages the brittle and amusing serio-comedy of 1960s manners. Ever since the Merchant-Ivory triumphs, and Ang Lee waltzing so confidently through Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility, the British movie industry has never worried about entrusting well-written period pieces to foreigners.

Remarkably, Hornby's script was not tailored for overseas or youthful audiences. There's a scene showing the philanderer and his pal doing secret business with a man called "Rachman", and another in which the girl's father rides in an elite limo and chuckles that it feels like "Eamonn Andrews". Any potential movie-goer who knows who those chaps were, and can still remember them, will savour the aspic-like flavour of this period piece. And be cheered by the knowledge that Ms Mulligan is sure to win an Oscar in later life, just like James McAvoy, Anthony Garfield and other Great Brit actors who are doomed to be too-young TOs in Hollywood for a few more years.