Slumdog Millionaire and its director, Danny Boyle, with their modern-day fairy tale about hope and hard times in the slums of Mumbai, pushed aside big-studio contenders to sweep top honors at the 81st annual Academy Awards on Sunday.
“You dwarf even the sky,” Boyle said in a tribute to the people of Mumbai, who figured by the thousands in his film.
PHOTO: AFP
He spoke while accepting the best director award, only minutes before Slumdog Millionaire was named best picture, helping give the evening a distinctly international tilt.
Boyle, 52, has been known for putting an inspirational twist on often dark and sophisticated movies that have included Trainspotting, about heroin addiction, and Sunshine, about sacrifice on a mission to reignite the sun.
The many prizes for Slumdog Millionaire — writer Simon Beaufoy was honored for best adapted screenplay, among other prizes — completed the film’s steady march past competitors like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon.
The best picture award was a first for Fox Searchlight, which distributed Slumdog Millionaire in the US. In the past, the studio appeared to narrowly miss the big prize with a series of comic best picture nominees that included Little Miss Sunshine, Sideways and The Full Monty.
In what was widely perceived to be one of the year’s few tight races, Sean Penn was named best actor for his performance in Milk, as the gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk.
“You commie, homo-loving sons of guns,” said Penn, who edged aside Brad Pitt and Mickey Rourke for the best actor Oscar, his second.
Best actress honors went to Kate Winslet for her performance in The Reader as a German woman who becomes romantically involved with a teenager while concealing her role in the Holocaust.
Hollywood has been taking on more and more of a global lilt with each passing year, but on this evening it was especially evident in the show and in the awards themselves.
After Penelope Cruz won for best supporting actress for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she gave part of her speech in Spanish — she said backstage it was a dedication to the actors and people of Spain — and then suggested backstage that the movies had to grow beyond the bounds of strictly American stories.
“We are all mixed together, and it has to be reflected in the cinema,” she said.
The supporting actress award, the night’s first, was presented by no less than five past winners of the prize, Whoopi Goldberg, Tilda Swinton, Eva Marie Saint, Goldie Hawn and Anjelica Huston. The heavy show of star power was meant to make good on a promise that the broadcast would deliver entertainment value that reached far beyond that offered by the nominees.
Heath Ledger, in a widely anticipated development, won the best supporting actor prize for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Ledger died unexpectedly of a drug overdose early last year, before Dark Knight was released.
Ledger’s parents afterward said his Oscar statuette would be held in trust by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Many other awards also went to those favored in the preshow betting.
Dustin Lance Black won the best original screenplay Oscar for Milk. Black, who is openly gay, said Milk’s story had given him hope that one day he might “fall in love and even get married.”
Beaufoy, whose Slumdog screenplay was based on a novel by Vikas Swarup, rattled off a list of places he never expected to be — “the moon, the South Pole, the Miss World podium and here” — as he accepted that award for his work on a film that captured many of the movie industry’s pre-Oscar honors and was widely viewed as a preordained winner of the evening’s final award, for best picture.
Also in the first wave of awards, WALL-E was named best animated film, though it had been denied the best picture nomination that its backers at the Walt Disney Co and its Pixar Animation unit had sought.
Overall, Sunday evening’s Oscar show became a struggle between the ambitions of a producing team — headed by the veteran film producer Laurence Mark and the filmmaker Bill Condon — that aimed for an evening full of surprises and the apparent determination of 5,810 voters in the academy to bestow honors largely where they were expected to go.
A much-discussed new format for the show opened with a loosey-goosey showbiz number and proceeded along very self-referential lines, with lots of inside jokes that drew substantial laughs from the crowd inside the Kodak Theater.
Hugh Jackman, the evening’s host, started with a very short comic monologue that poked fun at his own failure to get nominated for his performance in Australia. He then plunged into a comic song-and-dance number that poked fun at serious movies that were nominated for best picture, including Milk and Frost/Nixon, and less serious movies that were not, including The Dark Knight.
An early appearance by the screenwriting winners helped give the evening a story line of its own: the awards categories were arranged in blocks intended to reflect the process of building a film, beginning, in the first segment, with a blinking cursor tapping out the beginning of a script on a blank screen.
In another departure, the celebrity presenters were not identified in advance, partly in the hope that a larger-than-usual audience would tune in to see who actually showed up.
Last year’s broadcast, with the smallest domestic audience in the ceremony’s history, had only about 32 million viewers in the US.
The show’s stage sets, overseen by the New York architect David Rockwell, were bathed much of the time in blue and included a vast crystal curtain. And the show was punctuated by deliberate references to movies that had played well with ticket-buying audiences last year but were often not in the running for awards, the nominations for which went overwhelmingly to movies that were little-seen.
To some extent, the show’s elements collided with themselves, as songs, cinematic retrospectives and actor after actor working Hollywood in-jokes crowded the screen. One sequence, directed by Bennett Miller, of Capote, was squeezed out altogether but was shown to the in-theater audience during a commercial break.
In keeping with the self-referential tone of the night, the best live action short was teed up with a live action short from Judd Apatow, with Seth Rogen and James Franco, in character from their Pineapple Express film, in starring roles.
“This is almost a surreal moment to me,” said the German filmmaker Jochen Alexander Freydank as he accepted the award for his Spielzeugland, which had not much to do with the antics that preceded it.
A reconfigured auditorium made it much easier for the celebrities to mingle during commercial breaks. The mood was lively and chaotic. Rourke sat on the edge of the stage kicking his legs over the side during several breaks, with a stage manager coming to shoo him back to his seat.
Jackman came across less as comic than as cabaret performer. Along the way, he did his best to try and keep the troops entertained during the commercial breaks, serenading his dad in the audience, reading a note from his wife (“you’re doing good so far, babe”) and even going up and down the aisles handing out cookies.
Still, all the showmanship seemed only to highlight the basic challenge of a ceremony whose producers were hoping to capitalize on movies’ strong commercial appeal: The best picture candidates — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire — altogether had fewer than half the viewers of The Dark Knight, an audience favorite that was praised by many critics but still did not make the cut.
In the end, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which had been the evening’s most-nominated film, with 13 nominations in all, won for its art direction and make-up but not in the crucial acting and directing categories. Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard, was the only best picture nominee to come away with no prizes at all.
Slumdog Millionaire, though it had no actors nominated for prizes, swept many awards other than those on the top line, including prizes for cinematography, sound mixing, score and film editing.
Slumdog’s eight Oscars was the largest total won by a single film since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 in 2004.
Phillipe Petit, the French tightrope walker from Man on Wire — which won for best documentary feature — walked into the ceremony on the carpet and said, “I haven’t been looking at the red carpet, I’ve been looking above and thinking of what it would be like to be on a wire above all this.”
In one of the night’s few surprises, the best foreign language film went to Departures, a drama about an unemployed cellist, from Japan. Many observers had predicted Waltz With Bashir, an Israeli animated drama about that country’s past war in Lebanon, would take that prize.
The glittering event at the Kodak is generally a pretty grown-up affair, but this year children from halfway around the world made a splashy appearance. The kids from Slumdog Millionaire had no trouble adjusting to the head-snapping cultural shift from India to the red carpet.
“I want to see Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey,” said Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, who played the young Salim in the film. “Seeing any of them would be cool.”
He was surrounded by seven co-stars who played the main characters at various ages. When asked how they felt about their film being among the nominated, they all backed up as if on cue and shouted, “Jai ho,” which translates roughly as “victory.”
Another child from India was Pinki Sonkar, whose cleft palate repair was the story behind Smile Pinki, which won the documentary short film category.
Jerry Lewis, the 82-year-old comedian who has devoted much of his time to raising money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from Eddie Murphy, who had successfully reprised one of Lewis’ most famous roles, The Nutty Professor.
“The humility I feel will stay with me for the rest of my life,” Lewis said. “To all of you people from the movie business, it is such a joy being part of you and of everything you do."
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