Jai Ho! India Triumphs as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Wins 8 Oscars By LISA TSERING indiawest.com February 26, 2009 02:43:00 PM http://www.indiawest.com/readmore.aspx?id=940&sid=1
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood, step aside; India has finally arrived. The freshness and vivid emotions of “Slumdog Millionaire” proved a welcome tonic to musty Old Hollywood as Danny Boyle’s love story dominated the Academy Awards Feb. 22 with eight prizes for best picture, best directing (Danny Boyle), best film editing (Chris Dickens), best sound mixing (Rasul Pookutty), best adapted screenplay (Simon Beaufoy), best song and best original score (A.R. Rahman), and best cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle). The audience at the Kodak Theatre lept to its feet to honor Boyle and his team, as Bollywood legends A.R. Rahman and Anil Kapoor shared the crowded stage with Irrfan Khan, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, assistant director Loveleen Tandan, the film’s technicians and its disarming child stars (more coverage in Section C). “In culture, fusion is a wonderful thing,” said Boyle after his win. “I felt that, working with A.R. Things melding together like this is amazing. “I sort of opened up a new cinematic pathway for Indian directors. At least, that's what they're telling me,” added Boyle. “So that could be incredibly exciting. If you get all these immensely talented directors and actors in India work, if you can get Hollywood and Bollywood combined, you’ve got a whole new genre of cinema, and that, to me, is amazing.” The awards also rained down on a very deserving A.R. Rahman, who took two awards, for best song (“O Saya”) and best original score. Rahman also performed “Jai Ho” and “O Saya” accompanied by a drum ensemble, vocalist Maryam Toller, and a troupe of local Indian American dancers clad in hot pink. Pop singer John Legend, who performed Peter Gabriel’s nominated song from “Wall-E,” also joined Rahman onstage. “This is the most important one, the climax of them all,” Rahman told India-West on the red carpet on the way inside the awards. “All of the people in India wish me love and prayers. I want them not to be heartbroken if I don’t get it, and I want them to enjoy it if I get it.” Later, backstage, he confided, “I had low expectations when I came to the Oscars!” Anil Kapoor observed, “It’s great, especially, to see the small films which have made it. It’s a great year for world cinema and a great year for independent cinema.” The child actors who starred in “Slumdog” — Rubina Ali, Tanay Chheda, Tanvi Lonkar, Madhur Mittal, Ayush Khedekar and Azharuddin Ismail — drew rapturous applause on the red carpet (see separate story). What made “Slumdog” pack such a wallop with Academy voters was not just its brilliantly colorful and passionate content, but the fact that the film represented a rags to riches back-story of its own. Fox Searchlight acquired the film from art house distributor Warner Independent Pictures when WIP was folded up by its parent company. Made at a cost of $14 million, “Slumdog” was expected to pass the $100 million mark by India-West’s press time on Tuesday. “One of the lovely things about this evening that the Academy has given us is that it’s a triumph for this kind of film really, and it is independent-minded and it’s working against the odds in a way,” said producer Christian Colson backstage after the win. “The studios are under pressure, but the studios have got to protect [smaller projects]. Because that’s where everybody starts.” But the film’s full-throated romanticism also appealed to voters, as screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, adapting Vikas Swarup’s novel “Q&A,” molded Swarup’s rags-to-rupees story into more of a love story. “I learned to stop being English about things like love,” Beaufoy said after receiving the award. “If you make a film in England about love, it’s hugely complicated. It’s all about marriage therapy; it’s all about subtext. It’s all about saying what the weather is like, and you’re secretly telling someone you love them. “You know what the English are like; they’re very repressed people. Let’s be honest; you don’t get that in India.” Added Boyle, “It is a love story, but it is heavily disguised. What I loved about his script was this: apparently, the spine of the story appears to be a game show, but as you peel that back, it’s a love story, which is deeper and more profound than a game show.” Colson lightheartedly rubbished rumors that Dev Patel and Freida Pinto had become romantically linked. “Dev and Freida have been extraordinary, shouldering the responsibility to promote the film. We’ve seen them grow up before our eyes. The rumors are definitely not true — unless they’re lying to us!” This year’s three-and-a-half-hour-long Oscars ceremony was reworked from years past to appeal to younger viewers by bringing in celebrities like Beyonce, Seth Rogan, Amanda Seyfried, Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron, perhaps to offset the older-skewed appeal of the Best Picture nominated films “The Reader,” “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Some reviewers (rightly) complained, though, that the show’s big production number, directed by Baz Lhurmann and titled “The Musical Is Back,” took up valuable time that should have been devoted to performances of the three nominated songs, which were instead packed into a quick medley. But show creators Bill Condon and Laurence Mark have been praised for getting ratings results: around 36.3 million people watched the ABC Oscars telecast, an improvement from last year’s record low ratings, while another 3.3 million viewers watched the show on TV in India. Producer Christian Colson said, “America is changing. From the moment we started making the film to now, America is cool again for the first time in my lifetime. Not because of this, but it’s a symptom of how America is ready to embrace a global project like this one.” Nancy Utley, chief operating officer at Fox Searchlight, the division of 20th Century Fox that led “Slumdog” to its golden victory, summed up the film’s success to the New York Times. “I think it demonstrates that a good story well told, whether it is about someone in Mumbai, China or around the corner, will find an audience,” she said. -- regards, Vithur
