Word: slumdog
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Oscar went international with a vengeance on Sunday night, as the underclass-boy-makes-good fable Slumdog Millionaire took home eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director (Danny Boyle) and Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy). In addition, three of the four acting prizes went to foreigners. For England's Kate Winslet, her sixth Oscar nomination was the charm after being named Best Actress for her role as a concentration camp guard in The Reader. Spanish enchantress Penélope Cruz won Best Supporting Actress for her fiery painter in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, making her the first Spanish actress...
...film history, after Titanic), and which represents a big-budget action picture as only Hollywood can make them. The "would like to be": the message films Milk and The Reader, which hammer home Hollywood's liberal views on gays and its unslakable fascination with the Holocaust. And the "was": Slumdog. With its skimpy budget ($14 million) and mongrel pedigree, it might seem like the odd dog out; but the movie is really classic Hollywood - not just in its inspirational story of a poor kid pursuing an impossible dream, but in its goal of keeping a mass audience entertained...
...Hollywood nativists are rankled that the top prize and headlines went to a foreign movie, the feeling may be similar on the Indian subcontinent, where Slumdog's box office take hasn't even approached that of any robust local film. As pleased as they might be about the picture's international éclat, the folks in Mumbai also realize that the first "Bollywood" production to make a major impact at the Academy was written, produced and directed by Englishmen - subjects of the old Raj. In the 1980s, Gandhi, another film about Indians and made by colonialists, took Best Picture. This...
...host 50 years ago, cavorted and mugged for nearly 20 minutes when he was told the show had run short. This year, the Oscar show ended right on time. But the odds are that, 50 years from now, no one will remember much about it - except that the underdog Slumdog...
India has clearly been the flavor of this Oscar season. While Slumdog Millionaire predictably won eight of the 10 golden statuettes it was in the running for - including the Best Picture - even the low-profile Smile Pinki, a documentary about a girl from a village in India with a cleft lip, surprised with its win in the Short Documentary category. Indian TV anchors have been wildly ecstatic, but reactions outside newsroom are decidedly mixed. Some feel happy for Slumdog's Indian connection - especially for the awards for A.R. Rahman (best original score and for theme song Jai Ho) and Resul...