Guyz... Your thoughts on this rubbish article please Im extremely
disappointed with this article
Link to this article:
http://in.news.yahoo.com/48/20090224/1241/top-it-shouldn-t-have-won.html
Frankly, I don't think Slumdog Millionaire deserved
the Oscar for best film. And even more frankly, I don't think Resul
Pookutty should have invoked my country and my civilisation in his
acceptance speech for best sound mixing. India was not up there in the
Kodak auditorium for approval. It was a British film financed by the
indie subsidiary of an American studio which happened to be set in
India and as a result they could not help but involve Indian actors
(including Indian-origin Britishers) and shoot it in India. We crave
too much for international recognition. A bit too much than is seemly.
Even as all of us go around strutting, pretending to be a superpower.Other
than Slumdog, I have seen only one film out of the other four
nominated. But I've read about all of them. The one that I saw is The
Reader. The subject is far more intellectually challenging, emotionally
moving and morally disturbing than Slumdog can ever hope to be. Not
since A Last Tango In Paris has nudity (both male and female) been so
necessary to a film's narrative, and so non-titillating and so
touching. A film which stretches over 30 years and with essentially
only two characters, and yet a film that is as gripping as a thriller.
It's a film that, as my friend told me, demands and requires to be seen
in one sitting, with no interruption by commercials and visits to the
loo.But look at the themes of the other movies that were
nominated this year. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the love
story of a man who is born as an extreme geriatric and keeps getting
younger and dies as a newborn. Only for a brief period of time are the
man and his beloved around the same compatible age. Of course it's an
impossible concept and completely unbelievable, but it's a high
concept. Milk is about the first openly gay man to be elected to public
office in the United States; Frost/Nixon about the first interview
disgraced US President Richard Nixon gave, to has-been TV journalist
David Frost. For both of them, it is a chance for redemption, for a
somewhat sane life. These are all big themes. I am not doubting
Slumdog's quality as a film in any way. Danny Boyle is one of the most
talented directors around. But comparing Slumdog to The Reader is
almost impossible. It's like comparing A Christmas Carol to Great
Expectations.Scrooge won, little Pip lost. But that's the way it
has been with the Oscars. Sometimes the nominations reflect the mood of
America's liberals, sometimes the winners reflect political
correctness. In 2006, the following five films were nominated: Good
Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Capote and Munich. Good
Night and Good Luck is about a TV broadcaster who took on the
McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s; essentially about freedom of the
press. Brokeback Mountain deflated the entire mythology of uber-macho
frontiersmen by portraying a deep homosexual relationship between two
cowboys. Crash interlinked several stories to study racism in all its
forms and in startling ways. Capote was about the gay writer Truman
Capote who travels to the South of the US to write a book on two
multiple murderers. Munich told the story of the Israeli agents who
hunted down the Black September terrorists who killed Israeli athletes
during the Munich Olympics, and asked the question: To take revenge, do
we become as base as the men who are our targets?There's a clear
pattern: anger over the Iraq war, the stifling of the media, the
stranglehold of neo-conservatism, the contempt for minorities. The
denizens of Hollywood were simply reacting to their world as they saw
it. The other major critically-acclaimed movies of that year were
Transamerica, about one man's battle to change his gender, and Syriana,
which told Americans that their nation's policies were largely
responsible for Islamist terrorism.Then there's political
correctness. Gandhi won Best Picture over ET. The Academy decided that
the biopic of a great and influential leader was more important than
the woes of a cute alien stranded on our planet. (This incensed Steven
Spielberg so much that he decided to give the Academy the important
films they felt comfortable with, and made The Colour Purple - which
didn't win any Oscars - and Schindler's List - which raked them in.)
Tom Hanks won his first best acting Oscar for Philadelphia, as much for
his acting as for being the first major star to portray a gay man
suffering from AIDS. In Hollywood, that's called courage.So
The Reader can't win. After all, its female protagonist is a former
Auschwitz guard who let 300 Jews burn alive in a locked church. The
film's position on morality is too nuanced for the general Academy
member to grapple with with any success. But Kate Winslet can be given
the award for best actress. By taking this
