What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2009

The Year: 2009
What the Nominees Were: The number of nominations went back up to ten, where it’s remained ever since. Avatar, The Blind Side, District Nine, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is excellent. In the Loop from England deserved a nomination.

What Did Win: The Hurt Locker
How It’s Aged: It’s great that a movie by a woman director finally won Best Picture, but it’s sort of a joke that Kathryn Bigelow only won by making an all-male testosterone fest. This movie questioned what we were actually doing in Iraq in so quiet of a voice, that it could easily be mistaken for a recruiting poster.

What Should’ve Won: An Education
How Hard Was the Decision: Not that hard because I love this movie. I thought it would be nice to give it to a different movie, also directed by a woman, that actually dared to give speaking roles to women!

Director: Lone Scherfig

Writer: Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, Emma Thompson

The Story: In 1961 London, Oxford-obsessed 16 year old Jenny Mellor loses her interest in going to college as she gets seduced by a conman, getting a different type of “education.” When she realizes that he’s already married, she has to get her life back on track.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Picture, Actress and Adapted Screenplay
Why It Didn’t Win: Hollywood couldn’t resist pitting Bigelow against James Cameron, the ex-husband who cheated on her, making Hurt Locker and Avatar the only two real contenders. An Education got nominated but got lost in the new sea of ten nominees and forgotten.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. In the commentary, Sarsgaard points out a brilliant thing Scherfig does. In one scene, the whole point is that Jenny’s mom fails to speak up about the danger Jenny is putting herself in, so Scherfig subconsciously calls attention to that: “There’s an expectation created by the camera move that comes up later that the mother’s going to say one last thing, but she doesn’t. Like right here, in cinema language, she supposed to say one last thing right there.” A brilliant way to subtly dramatize something not happening.
   
2. The original memoir (really just a magazine piece) is well worth reading. There are so many things here that only could have come from real life because no one would make them up. Real sex is always so much weirder than movie sex, as shown here when David bizarrely wants to deflower Jenny with a banana.
3. I love how Hornby’s dialogue avoids the Sorkin Stammer. Jenny thinks highly of her own verbal abilities, and frequently tries to skewer whomever she’s talking to. In some scripts, her victims would just stammer helplessly because they had met a superior wit, but in this script, ever single person our hero tries to skewer whaps her right back (or at least has the wherewithal to say some version of, “It sucks that you’re talking to me that way.”) My favorite exchange: Jenny says to her headmistress, Emma Thompson, “I suppose you think I’m a ‘fallen woman.’” To which Thompson bats back, “Oh, you’re not a woman.”
   
4. Most deleted scenes are ultimately inconsequential, but here we have one that could not have been more important: Jenny’s only real confrontation with David after the truth comes out! But it was brilliant to cut it. The scene had way too much closure. What’s so great about the final onscreen ending is that it’s haunting. She never expunges the ghost of David, so he hovers over her whole life. She can pretend that it never happened, but she’ll always know better. Scherfig knew she had a brilliant script on her hands...but she also knew that the last page blew it, and a better one would make it a classic. She kept pushing until she found the bittersweet ending the movie needed. (Sarsgaard says the confrontation scene “never felt right in any way, shape or form.”)
5. Everything in this movie just swings. The clothes David buys her, the locations he takes her to, and especially the music playing there are delightfully hip. Who knew Mel Tormé could rock out? The country was waiting for the Beatles to wake them up (Jenny says “This whole stupid country is bored”) but, in some ways, it never looked cooler.
   
6. One thing I love about the movie is how low-stakes it is. Nobody ever pulls a gun. It’s just one girl’s education on the line, which is a hard way to make a movie, but refreshing. Sherfig says in the doc: “I was always taught that it doesn’t matter if a little girl’s dress is torn, or if 500 soldiers get killed on film, it’s a matter of which scale you weigh things on, and this film is hopefully as emotional as if something much more drastic had happened.”