Humbling the $150 million The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and several other solidly reviewed films and overcoming many controversies, Slumdog Millionaire, which cost barely $15 million, triumphed on Sunday night at the BAFTA awards given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The film, which has grossed a smashing $24 million in the UK in less than four weeks, was the most honoured film of the evening, winning the best picture, best director (Danny Boyle), best adapted screenplay (Simon Beaufoy) and best music for A R Rahman . Rahman scored over some of the biggest names in the music industry: Alexandre Desplat (Benjamin Button); Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard (The Dark Knight), Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus (Mamma Mia!) and Thomas Newman (Wall E).
It also took the awards for best cinematography, editing, and sound. In addition, the movie won the best adapted screenplay award from the Writers Guild of America on February 7. The unstoppable hit of movie-awards season has swept the Golden Globes, won a top Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as the Producers Guild of America prize, not to forget the Directors Guild of America award.
The BAFTA awards are the most prestigious of British awards. The win echoes The New York Times headline a few days ago: ’Millionaire’ Gets Richer. The BAFTA honours further increases the expectations that the film will win major Oscar awards.
While producer Christian Colson and Boyle thanked the city of Mumbai for making the film possible, writer Beaufoy thanked the author Vikas Swarup ’for his genius book’ Q and A which inspired the movie.
Dev Patel , who was nominated in the acting category which saw Mickey Rourke get the award for The Wrestler, told the media in London that he was super excited. ’I’m 18 years old, just to be nominated alongside these amazing names is a victory itself. So I’ve won. And I’m dying to meet Brad Pitt!’ The British gross for the film 10 Oscar nominee, which is yet to open in many countries, is the highest next to that of its North American gross. It has taken an impressive $77 million in 13 weeks in America and Canada where it is expected to reach $100 million without even the benefit of the Oscars.
The backlash against the film started in the United Kingdom several weeks ago with a columnist calling it ’poverty porn,’ followed by the charges that many slum children featured in the film were not adequately compensated. But the backlash has clearly not affected the film’s box office or the awards march, except perhaps in India where the film, thanks to the controversies and pirated DVD copies, came down by a whopping 70 percent in its second week, earning about an okayish $4 million in two weeks.
As some Indians are criticising the film for showing India’s underbelly, and some are questioning whether a non-Indian should have made it, many prominent Indian critics and writers have defended Boyle and his film. Among them is the best-selling novelist, Houston-based Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (The Palace of Illusion) who herself has come under criticism by some Indians for writing about domestic abuse and other negative things about Indian women. Writing in Los Angeles Times, Divakaruni argued that to say that affluent Western ’audiences are entertained by a spectacle of India’s poor struggling for survival in the slums of Mumbai’ is not entirely correct. ’I’d like to point out that the film is entertaining almost as many affluent people in India as in the West -- if by affluent, we mean people whose economic status is significantly better than that of the slum dwellers,’ she wrote.
’As for being fascinated by the misadventures of characters who are beleaguered, and feeling better about our lives by contrast, isn’t that part of the timeless pull of art?’ she mused. ’Isn’t that why Aristotle praises tragedy for its cathartic value?’ The days of old world white scholars looking at India with blinkers are over, she added, asserting that in the era of globalization anyone with an open mind can get a good and clear understanding some aspect of a foreign culture. ’It is now far more possible for artists, regardless of their race, to create a valid representation of a culture, if they have done their homework and are passionate about portraying the truth as they see it. It will not be the whole truth, particularly in the case of a roiling, complicated and contradictory culture such as India’s,’ she wrote.
Boyle had told rediff.com that his understanding of the Mumbai slum culture came from watching such films as Satya and the repeated reading of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. As for the critics who are angry that the film exaggerates the reality in India or only focuses on the negative, Divakaruni pointed out to the horrendous abuse of children that continues unabated across India. ’One of the aims of art is to hold up a mirror to society in the hope that uproar will lead to change,’ she wrote. ’Charles Dickens did this successfully -- novels such as David Copperfield led to child-labor reform in Victorian England. Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s early 20th century novels, such as Palli Samaj, inspired a movement in Bengal that bettered the condition of widows.’ Perhaps Slumdog will be the catalyst for a similar transformation, she felt. Before that, the movie could win key Oscars, further boosting its worldwide box office appeal.
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