8 Oscars Later…

Last night at the 81st Academy Awards, Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars, Best Picture, Directing, Song, Score, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography, Writing (Adapted Screenplay).

For those that have not seen this movie, it is about a young Indian boy from the Mumbai slums who gets a chance to be on the Indian Version of “Who wants to be a Millionaire”. This young boy, by chance, by being a genius, by cheating or by it being staged, manages to answers nearly all the question and looks set to win the 20 million dollar prize. As always, the show ends without the young boy answering the question, who is then arrested on suspicion on cheating. How could a boy from the slum answer all these questions? The movie portrays how this young slumdog was able to answer these questions through his experiences living in the slums of Mumbai.

What is so unexpected about this film was that it was not your typical Hollywood spectacle. In fact, the film was made for 13million dollars, a tenth of the production cost of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It had no recognizable stars like Brad Pitt, Sean Pen, Merrill Streep, and Angelina Jolie. They had unknown leads, Dev Patel who was from the “Indian-Inhabited London Suburb of Harror” and the stunning actress Frieda Pinto in her first movie role ever.

The movie was close to not going to the theaters due to a fold up with the distribution company “Distributors of Warner Independent” in May 2008. The film and its producers would have to consider making this movie go straight to DVD. Luckily, Fox Searchlight came to the rescue to take it to distribution. As Christian Colson, the producer of 'Slumdog Millionaire’ said in his acceptance speech: "When we started out, we had no stars, we had no power or muscle. We did not have enough money, really, to do what we wanted to do. But what we had was a script that inspired mad love in everyone who read it”

For this low-budget movie to win 8 Oscars it quite unbelievable. I personally believe that it is a wake up call to Hollywood, that this 8 Oscar winning movie was not due to the technology of making movies (i.e. special effects) but it was the raw talent of every single person involved. It is a movie involving ordinary people, in ordinary setting about the common man. It portrays the struggles of ordinary Indians who fight for their survival in one of the biggest and poorest countries in the world. You cannot help but be drawn to this tale and understand their day-to-day struggles, their joy and their pain.