What My Oxford Year Gets Wrong

Ihave fulfilled the obligations for my degree at Oxford, and all that remains is the graduation ceremony. Although I’m no longer reading textbooks, I am as busy as I was during the academic term, since I’m filling up suitcases and attempting to sell my furniture. (Please email me immediately if you want to buy a blue-and-white couch.) Still, it was necessary to carve out time for an extremely important cultural event: I hosted a watch party of the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year with fellow students.

When the trailer was released earlier this summer, it was immediately clear that My Oxford Year is a low-brow, Hallmark-style tragic romantic comedy intended for emotional American women who consider themselves intelligent, sophisticated, and too refined for Hallmark. However, here on campus, My Oxford Year was quickly branded as satire from the trailer alone because the dialogue excerpts were insufferably trite and entirely unrealistic, so much so that I wondered if anyone who worked on the script had ever engaged in a single conversation, let alone a conversation with a British student at Oxford. “That is a serious bit of crumpet,” the annoying gay male best friend says of the attractive male teacher. Somewhat counterintuitively, students on campus concluded that My Oxford Year needed to be watched, even if only for laughs.

About the Author

Abigail Anthony

Abigail Anthony is a staff writer at National Review.

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Ihave fulfilled the obligations for my degree at Oxford, and all that remains is the graduation ceremony. Although I’m no longer reading textbooks, I am as busy as I was during the academic term, since I’m filling up suitcases and attempting to sell my furniture. (Please email me immediately if you want to buy a blue-and-white couch.) Still, it was necessary to carve out time for an extremely important cultural event: I hosted a watch party of the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year with fellow students.

When the trailer was released earlier this summer, it was immediately clear that My Oxford Year is a low-brow, Hallmark-style tragic romantic comedy intended for emotional American women who consider themselves intelligent, sophisticated, and too refined for Hallmark. However, here on campus, My Oxford Year was quickly branded as satire from the trailer alone because the dialogue excerpts were insufferably trite and entirely unrealistic, so much so that I wondered if anyone who worked on the script had ever engaged in a single conversation, let alone a conversation with a British student at Oxford. “That is a serious bit of crumpet,” the annoying gay male best friend says of the attractive male teacher. Somewhat counterintuitively, students on campus concluded that My Oxford Year needed to be watched, even if only for laughs.