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.

The Oscar Nominees’ lunch a couple of weeks ago was an extremely jolly affair. After our group photo, we were called up onto a stage, one by one, to be given our nomination certificates, while the rest of the class whooped and clapped. We were called up in reverse alphabetical order (Hans Zimmer, who composed the  score for ‘Sherlock Holmes’, was first up); I was worried that, as I’m nearer the beginning of the alphabet than the end, nobody famous would be left to clap me. But then I scanned the faces, and put names to them: Bullock. Bridges. Clooney. Gyllenhaal. There were plenty of A-Gs.

“It’s the nicest part”, a previous nominee told me  before the lunch. “There are no losers yet, just people delighted to have been nominated. After that, it all gets depressing.” I told him that it couldn’t get depressing for us. We know we can’t win any of our three categories, and we’re still euphoric about the distance that our small movie has travelled. But this week, the tenor of the online conversation has changed. On In  Contention (an invaluable, readable and always trustworthy companion during this whole business) Kris Tapley notes that Carey Mulligan’s early buzz “seemed to dwindle throughout the fall awards season”, as Sandra Bullock started winning prizes; another website predicts that we will be one of only (!) one-hundred and thirty-five  or so Best Picture nominees in history to collect no Oscars whatsover. (We’ll be in good company. ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’ didn’t win anything either.) Ah, yes. When did it all go wrong for Carey? It must have been at some point between her Oscar nomination and her BAFTA win.

So far, 2010 has been eaten away by ‘An Education’, but after the Oscars, it’s back to work. I’m going to concentrate on two or three film and TV projects this year, all of which are at very early stages. I have, however, returned to my ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ column in The Believer, I’m happy to say, after eighteen months away. I’m racing through David Kynaston’s brilliant Austerity Britain, almost certainly to the bemusement of the young American readers of the magazine. Serves them right. Meanwhile, Ben Folds is mixing ‘our’ album, which should be out in the spring. And Juliet, Naked is out now in paperback.

There is, it turns out, a lot of paperwork associated with an Oscar nomination. Yesterday we had to sign a form promising that we wouldn’t sell our statuettes; we also had to fill out a questionnaire which asked us, among other things, which of our fellow nominees we would like to meet. My wife, after thinking about it for a good three seconds, replied “George Clooney.” She stuck an exclamation mark after his name. Somewhere in Los Angeles, an official of the Academy of Arts and Motion Pictures is putting all the requests to meet George Clooney in one mountainous pile.

I wish that every single one of the Arsenal fans who were in the stadium to see their team’s pathetic surrender to Man Utd, could be nominated for an Oscar, as I was yesterday. I have to say, Oscar nominations really help to assuage football-related disappointment. My wife, who doesn’t get to the games very often now that one of the children has commandeered her season ticket, was sitting next to me on Sunday; she got a nomination too. And so did Colin Firth, who was right behind the goal where Rooney scored. That may be it, as far as recently Oscar-nominated Arsenal fans go (unless Meryl Streep is a Gooner). In terms of the collective London N5 feelgood factor, it’s nowhere near enough.

‘An Education’ has been nominated for eight BAFTA awards – it received more nominations than any other film, apart from ‘Avatar’ (which I haven’t seen) and the brilliant ‘The Hurt Locker’ (which everyone should see.) And though that’s amazing and fantastic and wonderful and so on, I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that Rosamund Pike has been overlooked in the Best Supporting Actress category. She is, in my opinion, effortlessly funny in her role – but that, of course, is the problem. In life, it is much harder to deal with an incurable illness than to make a joke; in films, the opposite is the case. And yet nobody seems to be able to make that distinction when awards season comes around. I hope Rosamund can see that we would never have made it into the Best Picture category without her.

I haven’t posted much up here in the last few weeks – school holidays, snow, the African Cup Of Nations and so on – and I intend to post more regularly from now on. And to be honest, it’s not just time that has stopped me from blogging; the truth is that I don’t really know what to say about how I’ve been spending some of my time. Because ‘An Education’ is involved in this interminable awards season, there has been a lot of travelling, and talking, and party-attendance, and general sucking-up. So far we have been nominated for thirty-eight different prizes, according to imdb.com, and I’m not sure that’s all of them. I provide that figure not to convince you of our greatness, but to prove that there’s a lot of it about, and that it tends to dominate life to an extent one wouldn’t have thought possible. If I had to describe my occupation, I wouldn’t in all conscience be able to call myself a writer. I am currently an unpaid suit-wearer. And whatever you might think of my books and screenplays, I can assure you that I’m better at writing than suit-wearing.

Now that ‘An Education’ is out on general release, we have a never-ending queue of people happy to tell us where we have made mistakes with early-60s period detail. My mother-in-law is very anxious about a Pyrex dish in an early scene. (The word ‘Pyrex’ was invented by the glassware company in 1915.) Somebody else was troubled by the appearance of a tea-bag. (If you care, the tea-bag celebrated its one hundredth birthday this year.) A film critic who gave us a five-star review told the producers that the construction “I was so hoping…” was a verbal anachronism, and that ‘so’ plus gerund was imported from Australia in the 1970s . . .

It’s not just the period you have to get right, clearly. If you have set a film or a book at a time within the last seventy-odd years, then it’s people’s memories of the period you have to respect, too. If they don’t remember tea-bags, then you’ve had it.

The first episode of ‘The Richest Man In Britain’ is on Radio 4 this Friday at 11.30. I am not entirely clear whether that’s in the morning or in the evening, but I don’t suppose it matters much, what with iPlayers and iTunes and so on. You could go to the cinema to see ‘An Education’, come home, and turn on the radio. Or the computer.

It has been a busy couple of months, what with one thing and another, hence the lack of blogging. ‘An Education’ opens in UK cinemas today, which means that my promotional work is finally done. Thanks to our security-conscious government, I am able to trace readers of this blog who haven’t paid to see the film in a cinema; I’ll give you a couple of weeks, but after that you’ll be named and shamed. If you need any further encouragement, we have received universally positive reviews in the UK, and we have just been nominated for six awards by the British Independent Film Association.

Nick Hornby will be joining us LIVE this Thursday lunchtime to answer all YOUR burning questions on AuthorsLive.

Everything you ever wanted to ask one of the best writers in the UK, Nick Hornby can be answered LIVE at the click of a mouse. Get chatting about his new novel, Juliet, Naked, his film, An Education, out later this month, and there may be a bit of football in there too. Or maybe you want to know where Nick gets his ideas from? Does he use a pen or a computer? Or where does he write? All these and hopefully more interesting questions too!

Store your questions up, and make a date with Nick Hornby on AuthorsLive, 12 noon BST on Thursday 15th October and see Nick answer your questions, LIVE.