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.