My advice to you: if you get nominated for an Oscar, don’t play it cool. Not the first time it happens, anyway. In the event of multiple nominations over several years, you’re allowed to skip a couple of parties; if you’re a novice, however, you should really make the effort. I did, and I don’t regret a second of it.

Impressions of the weekend, in no particular order: our producer, Finola Dwyer an Oscar nominee too – on the verge of being escorted from the Kodak Theatre after a ticketless visit to the toilet, moments before the ceremony started; T-Bone Burnett and Michael Giacchino, musical geniuses both, deep in conversation at the Vanity Fair party, statuettes dangling casually from their hands; my new friend Geoffrey Fletcher’s genuine incomprehension when it was announced that he’d won an Oscar for his Precious screenplay; Piers Morgan, penned in behind the press cordon on the red carpet (his frustration and bewilderment were almost tangible); Colin Firth, inches away from us and trying not to make eye-contact, as he read the Academy’s tribute to ‘An Education’ from the autocue; Carey Mulligan’s face as the acceptance speeches for Best Documentary Short, the category she was presenting, degenerated into an unfortunate but amusing farce. (There was, apparently, some ill-will between the producer and the director.) And, inevitably, I was directly involved in a great deal of A-list celebrity obsequiousness, although I will spare the blushes of the A-list celebrities involved. (They might not want people to know that they suck up to writers.) Disappointingly, just about everyone I met over the last six months has been lovely, or at least faultlessly polite. There is only one fellow nominee I wouldn’t be pleased to run into again, and that was someone I had expected to like.

And now it’s over. I haven’t really written anything since I finished ‘Juliet, Naked’, a year ago, and though I will miss being in the same room as Meryl Streep, it’s time to get back to work. It may not be what I do best (I’m actually pretty good at being in the same room as Meryl Streep), but it’s what I get paid for.

Saturday Jan 17th

The story so far: ‘An Education’, a film with a script I adapted from a piece of Lynn Barber memoir which originally appeared in Granta, has been invited to the Sundance Film Festival. ‘An Education’, directed by Lone Scherfig, stars Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan, a brilliant young actress, and was produced by Finola Dwyer and my wife Amanda Posey. Now read on….

Amanda, Finola and I fly from LA to Salt Lake City. Utah is, I think, the twenty-third US state I have visited, and one I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to: for some reason, they tend not to send me there on book tours. Park City, where most of Sundance happens, is up in the mountains some forty-five minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City; there is thick snow everywhere, but the sun shines bright and warm every day of our visit. The snow thus becomes something of a mystery. In London it would have turned to an unappealing grey sludge before vanishing altogether. We dump our bags in the hotel, which also doubles as the Festival’s HQ, and head straight off out to see a movie that we’ve been invited to by its screenwriters. We have two tickets between the three of us, and the screening is completely sold out, but when we get to the cinema my wife explains plaintively that Finola has dropped hers in the snow somewhere. I wince, and then remember that it’s only through desperate lies like this that ‘An Education’ got made at all. The flustered usherette waves us through, and we all find seats. The film, ‘500 Days Of Summer’, is great, fresh and funny and true in a way that romantic comedies rarely are.

Afterwards, we catch a shuttle bus from the cinema to a party for the movie. The bus is packed, and everyone is talking about film; in the gangway next to us, a young cinematographer is chatting animatedly to a Canadian documentary maker.  In five years’ time the two of them will probably onstage at the Oscar ceremony, remembering this first fortuitous meeting tearfully. We’re English though (Finola is from New Zealand, but similar national stereotypes apply) so we don’t talk to anybody, apart from each other. That’s why we won’t be advancing our Hollywood careers this weekend.

At the party, we are all told several times that there is a tremendous buzz around our film. There are two sources for this: one was an enormously helpful and sincerely enthusiastic preview piece by the respected film critic Kenneth Turan in the LA Times, in which he described ‘An Education’ as “probably the jewel of the festival’s dramatic films, and sure to be one of the best films of the year”; the other is that the film is premiering at the small Egyptian cinema, rather than the 1400 hundred-seater where we saw ‘500 Days Of Summer’. Nobody can get tickets, and this only increases our desirability. I can now see that booking us in the smaller cinema was a stroke of PR genius.  We’re the best film nobody can see.

We eat at a Thai restaurant around the corner from the party. We bump into my (English) film agent and two of her (English) colleagues; there are English film-makers on the table behind us. There are twelve English films from these islands on at the festival, a record.

Sunday 18th January.

I meet my friend Serge, of the rock band Marah, for a coffee. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, and they are expecting a baby now, this minute. I’ve got them both tickets for the screening, but they have no idea whether he’ll be able to use them. Serge tells me that twenty years ago, Park City was a proper gold-rush ghost town; now it’s a thriving, cute, middle-class ski-resort, full of smart gift shops and restaurants, like a snowy Henley-on –Thames.  Those who have been before, like the actor Dominic Cooper (who, like Carey, has two films on at the festival – he is in ours and ‘Brief Interviews With Hideous Men’, an adaptation of the David Foster Wallace book), tell us that this year it’s much quieter, and therefore much nicer – the state of the economy has reduced Sundance attendances by a third, some reckon. But the streets are crowded, and the movies are all selling out, so it feels like any more people than this would be unnecessary. The puffa jackets and the ski-hats flatten everybody out, turn the film stars into normal people; you can be walking behind a perfectly ordinary-looking man striding out on his own, and then watch him stop to have his photo taken by someone walking towards you, someone who has the advantage of seeing his face. (Well, that happened once. It was Robin Williams.)

Our screening is at three pm. We meet up with Lone Scherfig the director, and Carey, and people from Endgame, the US financiers, in the green room, and now I’m properly nervous. Of course, just as you have to share the credit if a film turns out OK, you can deflect the blame if it goes wrong: it was miscast, badly-edited, the performances were poor, it was under-funded, and so on. And actually, if it goes right, it will be Lone who attracts most of the praise. But this is a family affair: my wife and I will both be depressed if it goes down like a lead zeppelin (and doesn’t that spelling look weird?)  And we were the ones who started this whole stupid, misbegotten project in the first place. I was the one who first read Lynn’s original piece, and Amanda and Finola optioned it. We are entirely the authors of our own misfortune.

We take our seats, but there’s a long delay while people mill around looking for empty places. The tickets at Sundance aren’t numbered, and some people have passes that get them in to any screening they fancy, which inevitably means that attendances can exceed capacity. Lone is standing by the side of the stage, waiting to introduce the film, so her seat is empty; three times a stressed-out official tries to fill it. I look for Serge, but can’t find him. I imagine him in a hospital in Salt Lake, urging his wife to remember her breathing. I wish we were having a baby this afternoon.

I have seen the film twice before, once in its finished version, and both times it has been difficult for me to read how it’s playing. The first two thirds contain jokes, and on a good day people laugh at them; the last third is more serious, and intended to move an audience.  In other words, the last half-hour is an agony of silence. (I often wonder whether I have always written would-be comic novels simply because it helps me ascertain whether people are awake at readings.) Three people leave in the second half of the film. Two of them come back (one of them, I realise, was Carey). I hate the third. I remember a story that a friend with a bad Sundance experience told me: he said that during a screening of one of his films a few years ago, all he could hear was the sound of slapping seats, as industry professionals decided that they’d seen enough to make their minds up. We fared better than that – you could definitely hear the soundtrack – but when the credits came up, I still wasn’t at all sure how we’d done.

Lone, Carey, Dominic and I go onstage for the Q&A – the people who’ve stayed for it seem genuinely taken by the film, which is a relief. Afterwards, I go outside to smoke round the back of the cinema, and Lone, our Danish director, introduces me to a compatriot, a woman who is a juror on the awards panel.
“Hello,” I say. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
I know she’s a juror, but it wouldn’t kill her to lie politely, I think. To tell a screenwriter that you enjoyed his film is not the same thing as telling him that you will shower him with prizes.
“I cannot tell you that,” she says firmly.
“Oh.”
I try to think of another pleasantry that will not compromise her obviously formidable integrity.
“Well…Thanks for coming.”
“I had no choice,” she says, but she still seems to expect a chat.
I shrug helplessly. “I’ve got nothing left,” I tell her. She walks away.
I check my phone to see if Serge has left a message about Monica going into labour, and it turns out that they came to the screening and couldn’t get anywhere near it. The tickets we had worked hard to get them were useless. There’s another message from Scott, one the co-writers of ‘500 Days Of Summer’. His tickets were no good either. We only invited four friends, and none of them got inside the cinema.

One of the points – the chief point – of premiering the film at Sundance is to try and sell the film to an American distributor. ‘An Education’ was made without any distribution already in place, which means that there was no guarantee that anyone would ever see it in a cinema, a fate that befalls a surprisingly large number of movies. To our delight, we had sold it for UK release shortly before the festival, but the US financiers need American distribution. It’s not our problem, but of course we all want it too: it’s been made for people to watch, on a big screen. Everything I had read in the trade press about Sundance in the run-up to the Festival contained dire warnings about the economy’s impact on sales; nobody was expecting much to happen. Our sales agents were confident that they’d get something, but they thought it would take time, that distributors would need to see all the movies before committing themselves to one or two. We were prepared not to hear anything for a week or two.  But when we get to the strange and rather cheerless village hall that is our post-film party venue, we hear that an offer has already been made. We are jubilant. It turns out that it is a very bad offer – insulting, even, if you know enough to be insulted, which I don’t. So I remain jubilant, like an idiot.
At the party I am introduced to David Carr, whose brilliant memoir ‘Night Of The Gun’ was one of my favourite books of last year: he wants to speak to me for his New York Times blog. It doesn’t seem right. The book is so great that I feel I should be interviewing him.
He starts with an apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to leave your film halfway through. I was called out to interview Robert Redford.” The man who didn’t come back was David Carr, author of ‘Night Of The Gun’! And he had a good excuse anyway! I can now account for one hundred per cent of the leavers: two weak bladders (or in Carey’s case, completely understandable nerves) and a summons from a megastar.
When we get back to the hotel late that night, Amanda tells me that there is quite a lot going on: the insulting offer has been superseded by several less insulting offers. Distributors liked the film, and some of them want to buy it.

Monday 19th January

Lone, Carey, Dominic and I have a day of publicity. It becomes apparent quite quickly that Carey’s life has changed this weekend; her other film ended up getting mixed reviews, but her performance was praised to the skies, and everybody loves her in ours, too – which is just as well, seeing as she’s in every single scene. Within twenty-four hours she’s being described as the “Sundance ‘It’ Girl” in Variety, and “the new Audrey Hepburn” in the New York Post. It’s exciting to watch – like something out of an earlier, more glamorous age. As we walk through the Park City streets from appointment to appointment, several people want their photographs taken with her. She remains remarkably composed throughout the weekend. She’s a very bright girl, and I am certain that she will be able to handle this year with grace and charm.

Lone and I are interviewed together by a young woman from a news agency. For some reason, the news agency has positioned itself for the duration of the festival on the second floor of a guitar shop, in what looks like a broom cupboard; underneath them, rock bands are playing short, loud, sets. It’s as if they have deliberately chosen the worst spot in Utah for recorded interviews. It takes us about half-an-hour to push through the music fans to the cupboard, and when we get inside it, it’s obvious that the young woman hasn’t emerged to see any films.
“Tell us about your characters,” is her opening shot.
“Lone’s very calm,” I tell her. “But I can be moody.”
She looks confused.
“We’re not actors,” I confess.
Flustered, she consults her notes.
“It must be hard, working together when you’re married. Was there any tension?”
“We’re not married,” says Lone. Still. Where would we be without the press?

In the evening, Carey, Amanda, Finola and I go to see another film, and then attend yet another party. I think I have been to more parties here than in the whole of 2008. By now it’s obvious that things have gone much better for us than we dared hope: the reviews we’ve seen have been unbelievable (one of the first, on the normally snarky “LA gossip rag” Defamer.com, I wouldn’t have dared write myself), the film is almost certainly going to sell for a decent amount, and to cap it all, here I am giving Uma Thurman a light. I don’t have a lighter, so I hand her my cigarette. (I can only just reach – she’s about a metre taller than me.)
“If you can live with the intimacy that implies,” she says.
And then I woke up.
I am always on the verge of giving up smoking, but my habit has resulted in my meeting both Uma (as I now think of her) and Kurt Vonnegut. Where’s the incentive?

Amanda and Finola sign an agreement with Sony Classics in the Virgin lounge at San Francisco airport. When we get home we are told that ‘An Education’ won the Audience Award, and a prize for John de Borman’s cinematography. Nothing from the Danish juror, though.

Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Jay Moore, in a paper entitled ‘The Role Of Celebrity Endorsements in Politics: Oprah, Obama, and the 2008 Democratic Primary’, reckon that Oprah’s endorsement “was responsible for 1,015,559 votes for Obama”. Typical academics: they’ll never stick their neck out.

(From James Wolcott’s rollicking article in Vanity Fair, ‘The Good, The Bad And the Joe Lieberman’)

…the two passages below on consecutive days. The first is a piece of dialogue from an embittered woman novelist called Elaine who appears in Meg Wolitzer’s razor-sharp novel about literary sexual politics, ‘The Wife’; the second is from a Norman Mailer letter to Don DeLillo in 1988.

 “But the men with their big canvases, their big books that try to include everything in them, their big suits, their big voices, are always rewarded more. They’re the important ones. And you want to know why?…..Because they say so.”

“I think you’re fulfilling the task we’ve just about all forgotten, which is that we’re here to change the American obsessions—those black holes in space—into mantras that we can live with.”

Good luck with that, Don and Norman.

…victory speech, Barack Obama told the crowd that “It’s been a long time coming…..”, he was, of course, alluding to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”, and who doesn’t love an election where you need to know a little about old R&B to understand the references in the rhetoric? Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it seems as though the line “It’s been a long time coming…” has itself been a long time coming, given the number of times Barack has used the word “change” over the last few months.

 What would Cooke himself have thought, if he’d been told in 1963, when he recorded the song (it was only released after his death in 1964), that it would one day be quoted by an African-American president?  He wrote it soon after he and his band had been arrested after trying to check in to a whites-only hotel in Louisiana; it seems incredible today to think that this kind of moronic incivility happened routinely in Obama’s lifetime.
 It’s not surprising, then, that even the grammar of the song is weary and mournful. Usually the construction “It’s been a long time coming, but…” is followed by another clause containing a verb in the present or present perfect tenses: “but the bus is here”, “but the baby has been born”. After the “but” in Cooke’s song, however, he is forced to sing about the future. In other words, it’s been a long time coming, but nothing’s happened yet. November 5th, 2008 was the day that a black man was finally able to use the phrase in the way that a white man might.

 PS. England’s front page headlines today.

Mr President (The Independent)

Yanks Very Much (The Star)

Gobama (The Mirror)

One Giant Leap For Mankind (The Sun)

America’s Historic Verdict (The Guardian)

A New World Dawns (The Express)

Home Loans: A Slap in the Face (The Mail)

Yep, yesterday will be remembered for the home-loan face-slapping.

…of dividing the world is separating those who can quote Dylan lyrics and those who can’t. Be honest: in which camp would you have placed George Foreman, former heavyweight boxer? But here’s George, interviewed in Dave Zirin’s excellent book about sport and the left, ‘What’s My Name, Fool?’

 “I was awakened by a young Anglo-Saxon boy from Tacoma, Washington, named Richard Kibble…..He would always play me Bob Dylan. I would hear those lyrics, “Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re walking ‘long the street/They’ll stone ya when you’re trying to keep your seat/ They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ on the floor/They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ to the door….”I hope I didn’t get that wrong…..I had a thing about those Bob Dylan songs, boy. “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”

I hope Bob’s seen that. He’d be chuffed, I think. 

…who have not been following the US Presidential election in great detail might be mystified by John McCain’s obsession with a man named Bill Ayers. Back when Obama was a kid, Ayers used to belong to the Weather Underground, the radical dissident group involved in occasionally violent protest against the Vietnam War; for the last twenty-odd years he has been a respected professor of education at the University of Illinois. Obama knows Ayers – they have sat on a couple of not-for-profit education boards together – which is why McCain and Sarah Palin have accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists”. It is, of course, a pathetic non-issue: if the Republicans are really so concerned about Ayers’ past and his political affiliations, they’d be better off voicing their worries to the University of Illinois, who seem happy to employ him to mould young minds – young minds which are then being sent out into the world to mould even younger minds.

 In the comments under an article entitled ’10 Things To Know About Bill Ayers’ on Lynn Sweet’s  Chicago Sun-Times blog, one Obama-baiting correspondent unwittingly blows McCain’s whole ‘argument’: 

If Osama bin Laden suddenly became a professor of education would we now feel it is ok to associate with him? No! no one in their right mind would even speak to the man! How is this any different?

Can anyone answer that? Can anyone else see the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Bill Ayers, a man who faced no charges even when he gave himself up to the police twenty-eight years ago?

 I love the idea that Bin Laden might “suddenly” become a professor of education at an American university.  Wouldn’t the department smell a rat at some point – if not on receipt of his job application, then maybe during the interview? (“You seem awfully familiar, Mr Bin Laden. Have we seen you on TV?”) And surely his CV would have a few holes in it? Is it really so easy to enter American academia when you’ve been living in a cave for seven years? Best of all, though, is the huffy indignation in the penultimate sentence: “No-one in their right mind would even speak to the man!” That’s what would happen to Osama if he started lecturing in Illinois: he’d be sent to Coventry.  That would teach him a lesson.

Meanwhile. McCain happily refers to his countrymen as “my fellow prisoners”…

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0mBi7d6e5KI

…and nobody seems too concerned. If I were an American voter, I’d worry more about a seventy-two-year-old man who seems to have a real difficulty in accessing the right words under pressure than I would about Obama’s relationship with a university professor and author. 

…with Neil Hannity on Fox in the US a couple of weeks ago, Sarah Palin defended John McCain’s use of a phrase that is coming back to haunt him:

HANNITY: Senator Barack Obama yesterday was attacking Senator McCain for saying that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Do you believe that the fundamentals of our economy are strong?
 
 PALIN: Well, it was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Senator McCain chose to use. The fundamentals that he was having to explain afterwards, he means the work force, he means ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong, that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack based on verbiage that John McCain used. Certainly, it is a mess, though.

It was a typically Palinesque answer which managed to demonstrate both her ignorance (she thinks “verbiage” means “words”, unless she believes that “verbage”, which is what she seemed to say in the interview, is actually a word) and her baffling rhetorical style. That last sentence would be a losing concession, coming from the lips of most politicians.

Let’s take her defence at face value, and accept that “the fundamentals” means both “the work force” and “the ingenuity of the American people”. Why does he never seem to explain this? The Youtube clip below shows that he’s had plenty of opportunity. Why doesn’t he vary the phrasing sometimes? Get a little work force/ingenuity action going?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKGyhiE7SE

…for ‘A Long Way Down’ a couple of years ago, I gave a radio interview on a temporary stage outside a baseball stadium in Chicago. Afterwards, a remarkably beautiful and very charming young woman on her way to the game asked me to sign a copy of Fever Pitch, and though all my readers are beautiful in their own way, she was particularly striking – not least because I have signed very few copies of that particular book for attractive young American women. When I got home, our nanny told me that I’d met the ex-girlfriend of a friend of hers somewhere. I started to explain that authors met scores, hundreds, millions of people on a book tour, and that I was unlikely to be able to remember her friend’s former friend. “It was at a baseball stadium in Chicago, apparently,” Helen said. I told her with studied indifference that this did seem to ring a bell somewhere deep within .  A few weeks ago, Helen passed on a copy of the young woman’s first book, called ‘Why You’re Wrong About The Right’. (There was a photocopied picture of me and the author tucked into the dust jacket, and a little note.)  Her name is S. E. Cupp, and she’s co-written the book with Brett Joshpe.  A beautiful and charming right-wing sports fanatic! How many of those does one meet during the course of a lifetime?

 I haven’t looked at the book yet. It’s a great title, I think: most right-wing American political books have titles like “Why Liberals Are Stupid And Should Be Hung For Treason”, and as a consequence tend to get ignored in bookstores, which, let’s face it, are usually stuffed full of treacherous liberals. Aiming at Democrats is smart, and anyway helps create a comforting fantasy: maybe we are all wrong about the right. Maybe they’re as tolerant and as free-thinking, as concerned about the poor and the environment as the rest of us! Maybe it doesn’t matter who wins the US Presidential election! The world will be a better place either way!

 I thought about S.E. Cupp’s book a couple of times recently. The first time was when I was reading the Guardian letters page last week: readers from both Britain and the US were responding to a piece in which Jonathan Freedland  suggested – relatively uncontroversially, one would have thought – that the rest of the world would be disappointed were John McCain to become the next president.  “Our blood, sweat and tears were not shed to have weaklings tell us how to save the world (by continuously selling out millions of “other people” to totalitarian monsters),” said a Californian correspondent. “Should Jonathan visit, he had better drink with professors or like types at home or in gay bars, but had better stay out of real bars in Sacramento.” Rather brilliantly, that last sentence manages to weave together a rabid anti-intellectualism, homophobia and threats of violence, all prompted by someone in another country with the temerity to express an opinion. And then earlier this week, I found myself on the LA Times website, reading the many heartfelt and heartbroken tributes to the writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide a few days ago; depressingly, even there, someone of Ms Cupp’s political persuasion had managed to say something outrageously offensive.

 What I think about the right now, before opening the book, is that it’s a place where you can find a lot of dangerous, unreflective, unattractive bigots. S E Cupp would be doing well to get me to change my mind.
 

…my entire adult life, I have believed – or rather, never really questioned – what generation after generation of pop-culture writers have told me: that the dizzy idealism of the 60s was punctured by the bad-trip nightmare of Altamont, which prepared the way for the disillusion and solipsism of the 1970s, etc. But the more I read about post-war American politics (after finishing Thurston Clarke’s inspiring book about Bobby Kennedy, ‘The Last Campaign’, I’m now ploughing through Rick Perlstein’s razor-sharp ‘Nixonland’) the more I see that this reading of contemporary history is itself solipsistic, or at least impossibly cosseted. The sixties were great, I suspect, if you were in a band, or at an Ivy League college with a draft deferment, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and hitch-hiking to see Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. But if you were an African-American, a policeman, a member of the American working class eligible for Vietnam, a politician, or just about anyone else, then the 1960s were insane -  insane as in psychopathic, rather than insane as in zany. For millions of people in US cities, the decade was violent and scary, obscured by a fog of incomprehension and genuine foreboding.  Those protest songs were written because there was a great deal to protest about, but somehow it’s the songs themselves, sincere and decent and hopeful, which have come to represent the times. We remember “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”; somehow, the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll doesn’t seem quite so meaningful.