Chapter 11 - Slumdog Celebrities

Summary

Three child actors from British director Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (hereafter Slumdog) (2008) walked the red carpet at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles, for the Oscar ceremony on 22 February 2009. The celebrated feel-good film about a boy from the slums of Mumbai, India, swept the Oscars. It won in eight categories, taking home the award for best motion picture and best director of the year. In what was equally meaningful to Indians, it won for best original song and score, credited to A. R. Rahman and Gulzar, veteran composers of India's mainstream film industry. It was a picture postcard moment for the triumphant promise of transnationality in cinema. Much was made of the fact that, as for its protagonists, the odds were stacked against this film. It had a small budget by Hollywood standards (at an estimated $15 million), was shot partly in Hindi with no known actors and set almost entirely in Dharavi, the largest slum of Asia. By way of pitching for its success and explaining its timeliness, Fox Searchlight, one of Slumdog's distributors collaborating with producer Warner Brothers in the US and Celador Films and Film 4 of the UK, pronounced Slumdog “Obama-like” in its “message of hope in the face of difficulty.”