I beg to differ! The plot follows the canons of the genre far too predictably. For example, they should have showed what happens at the end of the speech at Wembley at the beginning. So the Duke starts a speech and is in trouble: what does he do then? Run away in shame? Plod on till the end? It would have been interesting to see his face at when he finished — and important for character development too. Instead they just show the starts of disastrous speeches a few times. Apologies to those who haven't watched the movie yet, but it's not much of a spoiler — in fact, it's pretty hard to spoil this film.

It's not a bad film — the excellent acting does rescue the mediocre screenplay to some extent — but I don't see why it is Oscar material. (Admittedly, I haven't seen any of the other nominated movies, so have nothing to compare it with.)