Summertime rom-com gone wrong: Popular cultural creators and reviewers as public pedagogues

Abstract

Using the Netflix romantic-comedy My Oxford Year and the premises of public pedagogy and critical media and information literacy, I pose and respond to two questions about ongoing enactments and representations of sexism in popular culture and cultural norms. First, I draw on evidence of the related concepts of post-feminism and enlightened sexism in popular culture. Second, I explore the function of professional reviewers as tastemakers and, by extension, public pedagogues for their readers. With its limited purpose and scope, this analysis contributes to critically oriented educational and scholarly work in a range of academic disciplines and adult education programmes.

Struggling to focus on work tasks one mid-summer afternoon, I decided to give myself a break and watch a mindless movie. Scrolling through the most popular Netflix titles available in Canada, I settled on My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025). As I watched the movie, I found myself relating scholarly concepts I had used in the past to it. The more I watched, the more the viewing became an informal analytical exercise – one that I decided to formalise.

In many ways, the film follows the common romantic-comedy or ‘rom-com’ route from an early run-in to a love affair. ¹ Anna has come from New York City to the University of Oxford to study Victorian poetry for a year in between her undergraduate English degree from Cornell University and a financial analyst job at Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs. Jamie is a brilliant doctoral student assigned to teach one of Anna’s courses. The implausibility of an English major being fast-tracked to a job in a finance firm or a working-class Anna attired in a top-shelf wardrobe aside, the film plays on a string of comedic situations and banter, along with a sudden dramatic twist to draw viewers into a story that stretches beyond romantic love to include friendship, family, loyalty, and life purpose. After my first viewing of the film, I developed two research questions to guide me through another two viewings of it for study:

(1) How can contemporary rom-coms produced for mass audiences exhibit progressive views about gender and reiterate traditional norms and ideals?

(2) How are professional reviewers of such popular cultural texts ² missing the critical mark as public pedagogues?

Some might argue that, especially with the first question, there is nothing new here – previous studies by adult educators, including me, have established both popular culture’s representation of problematic social relations and alternative interpretive possibilities (see, for example, Jarvis & Burr, 2011; Jubas et al., 2024; Wright, 2009). To that, I offer this response: Setting new data against old questions illuminates the persistence of and changes to trends found previously. Moreover, even an inquiry that seems to replicate what has already been done and found might yield new, interesting, and useful insights. With respect to my second question, I note that, even given expanding attention to popular culture as pedagogical, the question of how reviewers function pedagogically is rarely asked.

Some might dismiss the topic of this article outright. Although interest in public pedagogy and popular culture among adult learning and education scholars has increased in recent decades, as scholarly topics they continue to face some scepticism and occasional derision (Jubas et al., 2021). My search through this journal indicates that either editors or reviewers have not been convinced about the topics’ place in adult and continuing education scholarship or authors are not convinced that this publication is a suitable home for their work on the topics. This area of scholarship is so neglected that it does not appear on the list of neglected topics generated for one article (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2014). Granted, that article was published some time ago; however, I note the ongoing absence of research on and with popular culture as an educational resource and influence, whether in formal or informal contexts, in this publication.

Before moving into my analysis, I explain a few concepts I employ, offer a synopsis of the film, and outline the methodological ideas that informed my work. I then present my findings, structured in response to the two questions posed above. I close by suggesting where this inquiry might take me or other scholars and the usefulness of my analysis to adult education students, practitioners, and scholars.

Core concepts

There are three overarching concepts that guided my thinking throughout this little inquiry. The first of these is popular culture. Popular culture’s pedagogical impacts in the informal learning of everyday life is a form of the second concept, public pedagogy. Because popular culture and public pedagogy can produce varied lessons – a fact that I explain below – problematic messages and portrayals in texts can go unnoticed by audience members. To foster more complex, socially aware interpretations, educators – whether in formal or informal settings – can promote the third concept, critical media and information literacy.

Popular culture as pedagogical resource

It is well-accepted by adult educators that learning happens beyond the formal classroom and that students bring knowledge built up through their formal and informal learning into the classroom. The reality that education and learning happen every day and everywhere is the key premise of public pedagogy. For critical scholars and educators, that tenet of public pedagogy directs attention toward the

educational force of the larger culture and the recognition that to make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative, it is necessary to understand, engage and make accountable those modes of learning that shape students’ identities outside of the school. (Giroux, 2011, p. 690)

Culture itself can be categorised as high and elite or low and popular (Williams, 1958/2011). In contrast to elite culture, which is associated with the institutions and practices of the wealthy, popular culture is associated with ‘common’ people. Paradoxically, as Raymond Williams (1983) points out, ‘Popular culture was not identified by the people but by others, and it still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work … and work deliberately setting out to win favour’ (p. 237, emphasis in original). In distinguishing between the elite and the popular, I am not inferring that the former is superior. First of all, as Williams (1958/2011) notes, all culture is ‘ordinary’, but never trivial. Even if creators of a cultural text mean for it to be escapist fluff, people might engage with it in myriad, sometimes unexpected and unexpectedly critical ways (Jubas et al., 2021; Williams, 1958/2011). Second, the characterisation of culture as elite or popular can shift. Religiously themed paintings housed in fine museums once served as pedagogical resources for parishioners who could ‘read’ them, but not books. In the reverse, Banksy has elevated much-maligned graffiti to museum-worthy exhibits. Despite the potential for ‘appropriation of high culture by previously excluded groups’ (Gripsrud, 1989, p. 203) or vice versa, cultural engagement remains socially contextualised and stratified. An important point here is that, whether popular or elite, culture can help indoctrinate people into a social status quo; it can offer opportunities to see different people and situations or to see familiar people and situations in different ways; it can do all those things at once.

Popular culture works in this manner because it engages people and people engage with it in complex ways. Human beings come to know as they think and reason, but there is far more to learning and knowing than intellect. A movie or a television series reaches and touches audience members affectively. The music, sound, colour, wardrobe, and set are heard and seen, creating a sensory dimension to cultural engagement and associated learning. Along with those dimensions of engagement and learning, individuals bring their experience and knowledge, developed in part through their prior encounters with other texts, to bear in any new learning setting. Further variations arise because no text is interpreted on its own; rather, one text is received in juxtaposition with other texts, a phenomenon referred to as intertextuality (Jubas et al., 2021). Increasing the variability in a text’s interpretation even further is the fact that interpretation is never entirely an individual matter; it always occurs in a social, historical, and cultural context. Ultimately, any text holds interpretive possibilities beyond creators’ intentions or audience norms and interpretations can change over time and across context (Maudlin & Sandlin, 2015; Mikos, 2018). For critically oriented adult educators, any text might warrant attention; the priority is to direct attention in particular ways so that critical learning can unfold.

Critical media and information literacy

It is true that consumers of popular cultural texts can construct profound lessons on their own, but there are no guarantees of that outcome. As Christine Jarvis and Vivien Burr (2011) point out, audience members who encounter characters in difficult, ‘no-win’ situations can become less judgemental and more empathetic. At the same time, people can overlook ethical breaches if they have bonded with enjoyable characters. Indeed, some popular cultural texts celebrate ‘bad guys’, from gangsters to demons. The reality that interpretations of a popular cultural text are varied does not mean that any of them will necessarily be critically oriented.

Combined with critical media and information literacy (CMIL), popular culture can do ‘triple duty’ in the classroom, by uncovering thorny but easily missed portrayals of social issues and relations in a text, making tricky scholarly concepts visible and ‘real’, and helping learners develop a critically analytical approach to media and information in general (Jarvis & Burr, 2011; Jubas et al., 2021, 2024; Maudlin & Sandlin, 2015). Messages that are never articulated explicitly might remain present in a popular cultural text and educators can help ‘students learn to explore media’s profound ability to manipulate audiences, through teaching students to challenge “commonsense” assumptions concerning the meaning of texts’ (Wright et al., 2023, p. 14). Moreover, even a text’s obviously progressive messages might be contradicted by its characters and storylines. Working with a pedagogical agenda of recognition and critique of the status quo, CMIL educators and scholars are as concerned with who is absent or silent as much who is present or vocal when it comes to message construction.

Teaching and practising CMIL has become increasingly challenging and crucial at this time of widespread mis- and disinformation, propagated actively through the social media that infuses daily life. The apparent ease with which public figures of influence and power, whether real-life or fictional, fabricate and obfuscate facts and problems adds urgency to critical learning and abilities (Wright et al., 2023). For all these reasons, incorporating popular culture into curriculum is fairly common (Jubas et al., 2024). What remains rarer is consideration of how reviewers of cultural texts contribute to public pedagogy. In responding to my research questions, I consider how CMIL can be applied to both My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) as a popular cultural text and reviews of it available on Rotten Tomatoes. First, though, I summarise the film itself and explain the procedures I undertook for my analysis.

My Oxford Year: A modern rom-com tale

I already noted that My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) ³ is a contemporary example of the rom-com. Reflecting the reality that cultural ideas change alongside social conditions and remain familiar across time, this centuries-old genre has evolved from ‘a comedy about the relationship of a heterosexual couple beset by altercations and misunderstandings which resolve in a happily-ever-after ending’ (Feeney, 2022, p. 14) to a form where stories might cross old class, race, and sexual identity boundaries. Established rom-com rules are manipulated to produce texts that appeal to fans of the genre and resonate with a contemporary audience. Despite growing cynicism about and, for some, rejection of the traditional romantic trajectory, Megan Feeney explains how introducing unexpected twists has brought a mix of superficially apparent ‘progressive potential’ (p. 17) and ultimate durability to this genre.

The couple at the heart of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) is Anna de la Vega, a working-class Latina from the United States, and Jamie Davenport, a wealthy White British man. Despite that class-crossing, mixed race coupling, the film corresponds to many rom-com conventions. The romantic leads are young and beautiful. Anna is crowned with a head of long, shiny hair, tastefully made up with gloss-covered lips, lined eyelids, and mascaraed lashes, and dressed in fashionable short skirts and tall boots. Toned, tidy, and stylish, Jamie is quick to flash his toothy, playful grin. They both exhibit good humour and quick wittedness. Anna has graduated summa cum laude from Cornell, Jamie is completing his doctorate, and they are both students at an elite university. They are the proverbial ‘complete package’.

Newly arrived in England, Anna is befriended by British classmates Charlie and Maggie. The token gay character, Charlie is fast-talking and flirtatious and happens to be Anna’s residence neighbour. With no make-up, loose-fitting clothes, and casually tied-back curls, Maggie is cheerful and helpful and – unbeknownst to all except Anna – harbours a secret crush on the most visibly racialised character, medical student Tom.

On their first encounter, Jamie speeds through a post-rain puddle in his Jaguar convertible, soaking Anna. Oblivious that he has drenched her, he meets her soon after in a fish and chips shop. Even his quick apology does not dampen, so to speak, her irritation with him and the insensitivity that she attributes to his privilege. Anna’s annoyance grows when she learns that Jamie will replace the professor who drew her to Oxford in the first place (although the professor will manage the grading).

A few evenings later, Jamie’s behaviour suggests that he might not deserve such contempt. After witnessing a stranger’s sexist, racist overture to Anna in a pub and her dressing-down of the offender, Jamie follows Anna outside to make sure she is all right. Now on friendly terms, the two make their way around town on an impromptu date.

Both grinning as they arrive at Anna’s residence, Anna bats her eyes before initiating a kiss. Declining her invitation to go to her room, Jamie wishes Anna a good night and heads off. Still, the two continue to flirt with each other and Jamie dotes on Anna. After he takes her to a little-visited section of the university’s library to see a first edition copy of a favourite poetry book, their mutual attraction overtakes them. Fleeing the library, they run along the rainy streets to Jamie’s car, stopping several times to embrace. Reaching Anna’s residence, Jamie pauses to confirm that any intimate relationship between them will be no more than a fun frolic. Aware of Jamie’s reputation as a playboy and that she is in England for only a year, Anna agrees.

Like any rom-com, Anna’s and Jamie’s story includes hurdles, some trivial and easily overcome, but some serious. The first of those comes when Cecilia, a woman seen so often with Jamie that Anna and her friends wonder whether the two are romantically involved, appears at Anna’s table while she is enjoying afternoon tea. Cecilia cautions her about getting drawn in too deep with Jamie. Anna continues her affair with Jamie but, as the passage of the months is marked by a Christmas church service and Valentine’s Day card, she remains confused about who Cecilia is to Jamie.

That question leads to the second twist (and here is a spoiler alert). When Anna learns that Jamie’s excuse that he needs to take a break from dates with her and focus on his dissertation is untrue, she heads to his flat unannounced. Finding Cecilia on the landing, she rushes upstairs to confront Jamie and is stunned to find him in bed with an intravenous drip in his arm. Soon afterwards, Jamie explains to Anna that he has inherited the same cancer that killed his beloved older brother, who had been Cecilia’s boyfriend. Explaining that, with his disease, treatment means ‘you don’t live longer. You just die slower’ (Morris, 2025, 56:20), Jamie insists that the time for fun has ended and attempts to break things off with Anna; however, Anna persists and persuades.

This is where the film obviously deviates from the rom-com formula, tempering comedy with (melo)drama. Jamie dies, leaving Anna to embark on the cross-Europe journey he planned. Still, the story has positive notes: Anna knows the truth and can bring Cecilia into her friendship group. Jamie can be honest with Anna, including about the friction between him and his father who, until Anna orchestrates a reconciliation, refuses to accept Jamie’s decision to halt treatment. Mostly, Anna and Jamie appreciate that there is far more than an attraction between them; theirs is a profound love described in the Victorian poems they both adore. In a final twist, Anna grasps that, along with Jamie, her heart belongs not with financial analysis at Goldman Sachs but with teaching poetry at Oxford.

Researching a rom-com: Methodological approach

The process of analysing a film is a form of textual analysis (Mikos, 2014, 2018), which fits within the core ‘methods of cultural studies’ (Mikos, 2018, p. 412). Often, textual analysis is concerned with ‘lived experiences, social practices and cultural representations, which are considered in their network-like or intertextual links, from the viewpoints of power, difference and human agency’ (Winter, 2014, p. 247). To conduct a textual analysis, someone might draw on concepts from critical theory, psychoanalysis, or poststructuralism, might use quantitative content analysis to count the appearance of objects or colours, engage in discourse analysis to trace patterns in dialogue, or watch for segments that exemplify a set of themes or respond to research questions (Mikos, 2014, 2018; Rose, 2016; Winter, 2014). I relied on the latter option for my qualitative analysis, responding directly to my two questions without employing coding to distinguish themes.

As I have done elsewhere (Jubas, 2020), for this analysis I gravitated toward Gillian Rose’s (2016) writing about visual methods informed by critical theory and psychoanalysis. From critical theory, I drew on Rose’s discussion of semiology’s ‘question of how images make meanings head-on’ and ways of ‘taking an image [or a text] apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning’ (p. 106). From her writing about psychoanalysis, I have taken the idea that interpretation – like all adult learning – is not solely an intellectual process; as Rose explains, there are ‘often non-rational ways of understanding’ (p. 151) that can slide into one’s worldview without pause or recognition.

Textual analysis might have several procedural possibilities, but it is executed deliberately and systematically. For my analysis of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025), I viewed the film three times. The first viewing introduced me to the text, even before I decided to analyse it. On subsequent viewings, I emphasised points about the social matters that interest me as an adult educator, rather than production or performance details. I generated two questions, which helped direct my attention as I watched the movie for the second and third times. With sub-titles turned on so that I could capture both the scripted dialogue and the actors’ delivery, I transcribed segments that I related to my questions and included timing notes for extracted segments. ⁴ Elements such as music and sound, set design or location, costumes, and cinematography are also important in creating the internal world or diagesis of a text, but concentration on those details is beyond the scope of this analysis and, indeed, my knowledge base.

In addition to data from the film, I used information from Netflix’s synopsis of the film and reviews of it available on the Rotten Tomatoes website (https://www.rottentomatoes.com), which are also texts. Before proceeding, I will explain how Rotten Tomatoes operates. The site covers both films and television series, with reviews compiled in two lists: the ‘Tomatometer’ for professional reviews and the ‘Popcornmeter’ for ordinary fans’ reviews. Tomatometer-approved reviewers are either highly regarded critics or contributors to highly regarded conventional or social media outlets. Within that set of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes designates some contributors as Top Critics, because of their individual output and reputation or their affiliation with ‘outlets [that] influence conversations surrounding the films and/or TV series they cover’ (Rotten Tomatoes, n.d. b, para. 8). Positive reviews in the Tomatometer section are marked with a fresh red tomato icon, while negative reviews are marked with a green tomato ‘splat’. Snippets of reviews are visible immediately, with clickable links leading to full reviews. ⁵

Reviewing cultural texts is never straightforward, and Rotten Tomatoes attracts its share of critique, with at least three problems noted. First, its simplistic system of averaging positive and negative reviews and issuing a summary ripe tomato or splat for a text does not account for how strongly reviews lean one way or the other. Second, its reliance on overall judgement obscures divergence among reviews, so that a text that generally receives mediocre reviews garners the same summary icon as one that some reviewers consider great and others awful. Third, its decisions about which reviewers and outlets are presented and, among them, which are classified as Top Critics can tilt ratings in particular ways and overshadow views that might vary from mostly mainstream reviews (CBC Arts, 2023; Emmanuel, 2025).

On the other hand, Rotten Tomatoes ‘has made itself one of the most important film sites for both moviegoers and industry professionals alike’ (CBC Arts, 2023, para. 1). One blogger describes it as ‘an essential player in the entertainment industry, bridging film enthusiasts, critics, and audiences with its influential scoring system, … [and having] grown into a cultural force and even a deciding factor for potential box office success’ (Ashif, 2024, para. 1). It is routinely listed at the top of recommendations for review sites that fans might want to consult, consistent with its self-description as ‘the world’s most trusted and recognised source of movie and TV reviews’ and ‘the most reliable home of entertainment recommendations for over 25 years’ (Rotten Tomatoes, n.d. a, para. 1). Problems aside, Rotten Tomatoes’ widespread recognisability and role in people’s viewing choices make it an interesting data source for this analysis.

This was a small, perhaps preliminary, study and I had to limit which of the many reviews I would use as data. I first decided to stick to the Tomatometer list, presumably the most influential of the reviews. Having scanned the snippets of all 33 reviews on that list at the time of writing, I downloaded the six available Top Critic reviews, a decision that I explain further in the findings section related to that segment of my data.

What I found while (I was supposed to be) looking for love

At the outset, I confess that I am not a fan of the rom-com genre when it comes to novels and do not gravitate toward them when I go to a theatre. They appeal to me only when I am looking for an easy distraction and I know that I can switch off a text, having made little investment of time, money, or energy. That distraction comes only if I overlook problem-plagued narratives which frequently rely on sexist, heterosexist, and other troubling tropes. Producers of texts financed by large, mainstream companies and meant for wide release count on audience members doing exactly that. Even members of creative teams working on such texts – the scriptwriters, directors, cinematographers, actors – can never ignore the financial producers’ over-riding aim to, in colloquial language, get bums in seats and eyes on screens.

While audience members accept a degree of creative latitude in the stories and portrayals presented to them, works of fiction need to be sufficiently recognisable and resonant for audience members to cooperate with producers’ corporate aspirations. Without demeaning the intelligence of their audience members, creators play on the tension between the emotional, the sensory, and the cognitive. Bringing pleasure needs to outweigh being objectionable. Audience members might be bright and astute even, as the psychoanalytical perspective that Rose (2016) outlines would have it, they are emotionally malleable and manipulatable. Although I do not empahsise the technical, production-related elements that contribute to the sway a film holds, I know that they help compensate for off-putting plotlines and characters.

In my analysis, I employ the ideas related to public pedagogy, popular culture, and CMIL that I outlined above. In addition to them, I introduce a few other concepts. In response to my first research question, I suggest how My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) juxtaposes contemporary refrains about gender-related advances, even as it reiterates familiar assumptions about beauty (especially in youth) and love. I link what I saw in the movie to the concepts of post-feminism (McRobbie, 2004) and enlightened sexism (Douglas, 2010). Then, in response to my second question, I explore the role of not just filmmakers and films but also film reviewers as tastemakers, who are also public pedagogues.

Love and loveliness

In the introductory section, I admitted that my first research question pertains to a long-acknowledged phenomenon but that, nonetheless, the question bears asking for the sake of sketching a contemporary illustration. Put simply, my point is this: Despite a discourse of progress when it comes to social relations, the representations in popular cultural texts routinely indicate the persistence of allegedly out-dated ideas. Gender identities and roles are especially central to romance stories and are the focus of my response to the question of how contemporary rom-coms compromise updated views by reiterating traditional norms and ideals. In making sense of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025), I draw on two related concepts: Angela McRobbie’s (2004) post-feminism and Susan Douglas’s (2010) enlightened sexism. Although they were developed over 15 years ago, they remain helpful in making sense of ideas in popular culture and the culturally popular.

Post-feminism and enlightened sexism

McRobbie’s (2004) concept of post-feminism is premised on the notion that, rather than rejecting the tenets of second wave feminism of the late 20th century, contemporary mainstream culture holds that feminist objectives have been met. From that perspective, the feminist movement ⁶ deserves respect and gratitude, but is a matter for the history books. The continued embodiment and enactment of traditional images of feminine demeanour and behaviour and routine self-surveillance to ensure those images are maintained are expressions of women’s choices and preferences, rather than social dictates or pressures. Popular culture often contributes to the post-feminist trend by constructing an irony of ‘undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism’ (McRobbie, 2004, p. 255).

Following McRobbie, Douglas (2010) proposes the phrase enlightened sexism as a more descriptive term for the cultural phenomenon that is occurring. As she explains,

Enlightened sexism is feminist in its outward appearance (of course you can be or do anything you want) but sexist in its intent (hold on, girls, only up to a certain point, and not in any way that discomforts men or pushes feminist goals one more centimeter forward). (p. 10)

As I now explore, the storyline of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) rests on the idea that feminism’s ‘real achievement was to give young women the right to choose what they wanted, and what they always and truly wanted, it seemed, was to be feminine and loved by a man’ (Douglas, 2010, p. 103).

Analysis

My Oxford Year’s (Morris, 2025) characters routinely personify the ideas behind post-feminism and enlightened sexism. When Charlie and Anna first meet outside Charlie’s room in the residence building they share, Anna introduces herself with a smile and extends her hand in a greeting. In response to a question from someone inside Charlie’s room about who is in the corridor, Charlie offers this summary about Anna, the newcomer from the United States: ‘Wonderful face. Shocking shoes’ (Morris, 2025, 2:41–2:42). A day or so after that, when they meet in class and Anna reminds him of his disapproval of her fashion sense, Charlie smooths any hurt feelings with this comment: ‘That wonderful smile more than makes up for those shoes’ (8:24–8:27). It is not friendliness, a shared interest in poetry or commitment to higher education, or having come from far away that matters; rather, the traditional ideal of feminine beauty stands out as the greatest asset in creating a positive first impression.

Quite a bit later in the movie, Anna meets Jamie’s father for the first time. Dressed in their finest to attend a ball, Anna and Mr Davenport engage in this bit of witty repartee:

Mr Davenport: I heard rumours that my son was dating a very pretty American girl.

Anna: Yes, I heard them, too, sir, but I didn’t let that stop me. (1:02:03–1:02:06)

What Mr Davenport highlights is Anna’s prettiness, while her scholastic achievements and intellectual promise, the interest in poetry she shares with his son, and even her instant popularity seem insignificant.

The centrality of Anna’s beauty to her appeal is not just something imposed on her by others; she is an active participant in the post-feminist, enlightened sexism established in the movie. For a Hallowe’en costume, she chooses to dress as Wonder Woman, clad in that superhero’s tight-fitting bustier and waist-cinching belt. She explains to Charlie that ‘it was either this or Ruth Bader Ginsberg’ (34:06–34:07). ‘Sexy ‘60s Ruth Bader?’ (34:06–34:07), Charlie asks. ‘No’ (34:09), Annie replies. In other words, she senses that arriving at a party of Oxford students – meant to be among the brightest young people in the United Kingdom – dressed as one of the most respected, ground-breaking U.S. jurists rather than a scantily clad superhero figure would diminish her reputation. To Anna, Charlie’s final statement on the matter is innocent flattery: ‘And you, you look like the slutty saviour of the human race’ (35:06–35:10). The entire scene is an enactment of what Douglas (2010) gets at conceptually.

Even as he tries to reverse the bad start he got off to with Anna, Jamie falls into the same pattern. Trying to smooth things over after the first class, he makes this comment: ‘Truly, I, I had absolutely no intention of starting a wet T-shirt competition. But if I did, then you’d win. Shouldn’t be discussing wet T-shirt competitions. Never been to one. Obviously. … I’m actually very mature’ (13:49–14:11). Seeming to comprehend the inappropriateness of his remarks, he alternates awkward speech with an attempt to self-correct. Still, his behaviour illustrates what Douglas (2010) labels as enlightened sexism’s ‘knowing wink’ (p. 13), the recognition that ‘guys are so dumb, such helpless slaves to big breasts [or female breasts of any size]’ (p. 13) that sexist comments are to be expected. Jamie might insist that he is very mature but, in that instant, his behaviour belies that claim and provides no reason for either Anna or the film’s audience to take his self-description seriously.

Even before he meets Anna, Jamie embodies enlightened sexism. His material stature brings him a fancy car, his track record of academic achievement brings him a sudden teaching opportunity, his good looks bring Charlie’s description of him as ‘a crumpet’. He plays on those advantages, acting the part of the playboy. In Cecelia’s words, ‘Honestly, it is a wonder you can get out of the house with all of the women you leave in your wake’ (Morris, 2025, 5:15–5:22). He himself confirms that persona in this exchange that occurs when he follows Anna out of the pub after her encounter with the offensive stranger described earlier:

Anna: Well, I wouldn’t wanna drag you away from your harem of girls back there.

Jamie: Well, if harem girls are anything, it’s patient. (24:58–25:04)

One other coupling develops when, near the end of the movie, the main characters attend a ball, and it too illustrates post-feminist, enlightened sexism. There, Tom sees Maggie dancing with another man. He takes note of her in a low-cut, tight-fitting gown, wearing make-up and jewellery, and realises how attractive he finds her. Witnessing Tom’s reaction, Anna chides, ‘It’s a shame it takes a dress and heels for a guy to notice’ (1:02:56–1:02:58). Anna bemoans the old message that being bright, funny, warm-hearted, and loyal are insufficient, even as she adheres to it herself.

To be sure, there are references to the confident, capable woman throughout My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025), examples of the ‘degree of slippage, or non-compliance with … [traditional] gendered channels of culture’ (Dowd et al., 2023, p. 209) in contemporary texts. At the same time, despite the advances made by women (alongside members of the gay and racialised communities with token representation in the movie), it seems that prevailing wisdom is as old as the Victorian poetry that ignites Anna’s and Jamie’s passions. Articulating the point for Anna and for audience members, Cecelia issues this cautionary comment when Anna assures her that she and Jamie are determined to keep their relationship light: ‘I know we like to think of ourselves as modern women, but when it comes down to it, it’s hard not to get emotionally involved. Trust me Anna, it’s not worth the pain’ (Morris, 2025, 42:59). As the movie progresses, Cecilia’s warning is borne out.

There have been meaningful and important legal, social, and material gains for women (and members of other minority groups) in the past century. Nonetheless, as Douglas (2010) explains, the legacy of feminism is not deep-seated ideological and structural change to patriarchy; rather, it is captured in this central rom-com lesson: In empowering young women as free-choosing agents, enlightened sexism grants permission for women to chase exactly what they were historically taught to emulate. I have discerned that lesson in my analysis, but how is it reflected in professional reviewers’ assessments of the film? That question takes me to the next section of my analysis.

A critical review

In this section, I move from an analysis of the filmic text to reviews of it. I respond to my second research question about the pedagogical role and potential of professional popular culture reviewers. More specifically, I turn to the notion of the reviewer as tastemaker and the tastemaker as public pedagogue.

Reviewers, tastemakers, and pedagogues

Professional or even non-professional but well-known reviewers—those among the so-called ‘influencers’ present in online spaces—function as what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) refers to ‘tastemakers’ who set 'a new mode of expression or action which will become a model, and then modal, normal, the norm’ (p. 255). Tastemakers, including reviewers, are positioned ‘between the production of cultural goods and the production of consumer tastes’ (Janssen & Verboord, 2015, p. 440). They help consumers determine which texts merit their limited time and money and, in so doing, ‘have a broadly pedagogical function, shaping the perceptions and preferences of consumers in order to mobilize their actions along desired routes’ (Maguire & Matthews, 2010, p. 408). Moreover, they teach their own readers and listeners about what to pay attention to as they consume cultural texts.

Of course, not everyone reads or listens to reviews and, among those who do take note of them, not everyone agrees with reviewers’ assessments. Like any form of cultural texts, reviews are received in multiple ways by those who engage with them. I return to the concept of CMIL, arguing that critical capacities influence the stock that reviews’ consumers place in these texts as a sort of primer for further cultural selections and impressions.

Analysis

Top Critics’ reviews of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) dismiss the movie as ‘a trifle’ (Anderson, 2025, para. 5), ‘unremarkable YA fluff’ (Castillo, 2025, para. 3), and ‘a frothy throwaway fantasy … destined to be forgotten about almost instantaneously’ (Lee, 2025, paras. 2 & 7). Relying on the plot twist introduced with Jamie’s terminal illness to add emotional depth, the film is described as a ‘half-hearted execution [and] limp attempt … [with] flat writing and direction’ (Yu, 2025, paras. 3 & 5). Although the scenes shot in Oxford add an aspect of authentic, if also romanticised, beauty, the movie remains one of Netflix’s ‘shiny, simplistic-yet-satisfying romances … [that] never completely commits to own thesis’ (Bibbiani, 2025, paras. 2 & 11). These review segments suggest that the top-ranked reviewers stuck to technical and aesthetic aspects as tastemakers, emphasising shortfalls associated with the film’s script, direction, and production elements, rather than deeper problems with its representations and messages.

At least one Top Critic is clear about the movie’s abandonment of any initial authentic feminist leanings, though. ‘What should be a tender, feminist-minded story centred on a young woman rediscovering her dormant childhood dreamer turns into a middling melodrama about being with a cute guy in desperate need of her rescue’, writes Courtenay Howard (2025, para. 1). In line with my view of the film’s portrayal of the post-feminist enlightened sexism that McRobbie (2004) and Douglas (2010) describe, Howard is disappointed that, despite Anna’s promise as an individual and her strength as a Latina woman coming of age, her insights and choices flow from Jamie’s understanding of both poetry and life. How Jamie manages to absorb messages about the centrality of passion and romantic commitment to a life well led even as he leads a life of short-term flighty relationships with women (before Anna, that is) remains a puzzle to me. In Howard’s words, ‘Anna puts herself in a subordinate role as a tool used to mend Jamie’s family’s fissures, allowing him to experience a greater arc than her own’ (para. 5). This reminder about the limits of feminism’s success in changing mainstream stories, whether fictional or real-life, is one example of how professional reviewers can go beyond their role as tastemakers and assume a critical function for their audience base.

There is another issue presented in the movie that warrants critical attention, but it has received little of that in Top Critics’ reviews. The flirtation between Jamie and Anna is noticed quickly by Maggie and Charlie. When Anna emerges following her conversation with Jamie after the first class, Charlie makes this quip: ‘Flirting with the hot teacher on the first day?’ (Morris, 2025, 14:39–14:41). What passes without any notice or at least comment is the fact that a romantic relationship between an instructor and a student violates ethical guidelines in contemporary universities, including Oxford, where Jamie and Anna study, and Cornell, where Anna completed an undergraduate degree. The University of Oxford managed to go without a policy prohibiting the type of relationship that Anna and Jamie develop until 2023 (see https://hr.admin.ox.ac.uk/staff-student-relationships#collapse1582166); Cornell University preceded Oxford by a few years, as its policy attention to problematic relationships can be traced back to 2018 (see https://policy.cornell.edu/policy-library/consensual-relationships). Regardless, by the time the movie was in production, policies forbidding a relationship between instructors and students enrolled in their classes or working under their supervision had been established in both U.K. and U.S. universities. The timing of the movie’s production, post-#metoo’s emergence, only makes characters’, most notably Anna’s, obliviousness to the ethical problems of the romance all-the-more astonishing.

It seems just as remarkable that the social problem set up in the movie escapes the attention of the most respected professionals who have reviewed the film, especially given the centrality of celebrities to #metoo and the extensive coverage of the movement by entertainment journalists (Jubas, 2023). Of the Top Critic reviews that I read, only James Bibbiani’s (2025) review mentions the ethical breach of the central romance:

I looked it up: Oxford didn’t expressly forbid romantic relationships between faculty and students until 2023, which seems like a long time to establish that policy. Especially considering Oxford has been around for almost 1,000 years. But Julia Whelan’s book [from which the film was adapted] was published in 2018, so technically this romance is only extremely inappropriate in principle. (para. 8)

If Oxford dragged its heels in its policymaking, on the whole reviewers seem no more willing to tackle an ethical and social problem on full display in the text they are examining.

Even Howard (2025) and Bibbiani (2025) miss a dimension of the ethical dilemma produced by Anna and Jamie’s relationship. When Anna makes a sexual overture to Jamie and begins a relationship with him, she is planning to return to New York to begin a career at a prestigious finance firm. At a time when ethics of intimate relationships figures not only in post-secondary policy but also in the finance sector and in all professions, I wonder why nobody – whether in fiction or in real-life – seems attuned to the fact that Anna, the brilliant recruit to a major finance firm, does not comprehend the importance of ethics in all workplaces of relationships that involve power differentials. With all her promise and intellectual acumen, Anna seems ill-prepared to act responsibly if and when basic ethical problems arise in her job. The Top Critics discussed here might not see that point as part of their tastemaking role or it simply might not have occurred to them; however, it might interest adult educators, especially those in business or work-related education.

From screens to classrooms: Implications for adult educators

Like any inquiry, the one discussed here has limitations. My analysis of My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) is one of only many possible interpretations. I have my own theoretical leanings and have employed a set of concepts aligned with them. Other educators and scholars might use other concepts and might develop a rather different ‘take’ on what they see and hear in the film. An audience reception study incorporating participants who watched the film would expose alternative readings of it. Bringing this, or any other film, into a classroom would simulate audience reception study by illustrating that understandings of one text can have points of predictability and convergence and unpredictability and divergence. Intertextuality, identity-related resonance, and personal background and disposition – which, as Bourdieu (1984) establishes, is always also social – help explain that fact. Also, I drew on a small set of reviews of the movie and know that other reviewers might have raised different points and reached different conclusions. Further studies could delve into questions about these and other considerations.

I have raised some problems and traced their presence in one rom-com, a prime example of how mass-produced popular culture has, for critically oriented adult educators and scholars, such disturbing effects. By using the beautiful, romantic setting of Oxford and featuring equally beautiful, likeable characters, My Oxford Year (Morris, 2025) sweeps audience members and reviewers up in the diagesis of the film and concerns they might otherwise see are swept away. Viewers and reviewers might concede some of the work’s weaknesses, without appreciating their extensiveness and seriousness. People who have had little exposure to or encouragement of critical thinking and MIL, whether through formal education or informal learning, are especially susceptible to problematic messages such as those explored here. Moreover, constant analysis and critique become tiring, and even generally critical mindedness does not inoculate against the normalisation of disturbing messages. Those facts exemplify the power that popular culture can have in people’s leisure lives and the value of bringing it into the classroom, especially in teaching about stubborn social inequities and CMIL.

Incorporating popular cultural texts and reviews of them in adult education can aid in conveying the ease with which problematic representations pass unnoticed, even for those expected to notice them. In setting reviews alongside a popular cultural text, instructors can insert the notion of intertextuality into their teaching about how texts of all sorts work together to help learners build their knowledge about social and cultural life, whether on- or off-screen. Students can practice new or deepened CMIL by applying scholarly concepts and literature to cultural texts and reviews about them, identifying pieces that cultural creators and tastemakers miss. They can develop self-confidence in challenging creators’ and tastemakers’ content and ideas and generate their own reviews and analyses. They can understand themselves as integral contributors to cultural processes and knowledge. These are, I believe, among the imperatives of a critically oriented adult education in today’s complex, text-infused world.