Slumdog Rules!

I have not seen "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and it is quite unlikely that I will actively seek it out. It is not the sort of movie that immediately appeals to me and its trailers and early reviews left me disinterested. However, as I watched the Oscar ceremonies last night (fast-forwarding through a Tivo-ed version), it was obvious that the evening was essentially a showdown between 'BB' and Slumdog Millionaire, which I wrote about. Any category in which only one of them was present was almost always won by that one - the significant exception being of course Brad Pitt (who was at most third-best - behind Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke). And when they went head-to-head, as they did in almost every significant category (except all of the actor/actress ones), SM came out the winner.

This year's Oscars had a predictable quality to them, with most of the winners being fairly obvious. Heath Ledger for best supporting actor, 'Jai Ho' for best song (the other nominees were another SM/Rahman number and a lukewarm offering from Wall-E), Kate Winslet for best actress, and Wall-E for best animation were all pretty much a given, with the only suspense perhaps being the presence of Meryl Streep in competition to Kate Winslet.

It was exciting to see AR Rahman win twice and close out his (decidedly tepid) acceptance speech with a dedication in tamil. His invocation of the "Mere paas ma hai" dialog probably left most of the audience mystified, but was intimately familiar as the recurring rejoinder to our poker-time banter. Equally heart-warming was the award for sound mixing that went to a well-spoken Resul Pookutty, who Malini informed me is from Kerala. It is probably safe to say that these are the first people from Kerala or TamilNadu to win an Oscar.

I attribute this clean sweep by SM to a couple of reasons: The lesser one is the conventional quality of the competition - it was hard to see any of the other nominees (other than BB, of course) winning. They just were not 'big' enough. And my guess is that even BB faded when pitted against the exuberance of SM. The greater reason I believe is that it is the perfect feel-good movie for these troubled times. While SM is not a Bollywood movie, it is very much in the style of one and Bollywood has been perfecting the art of feel-good escapism for many decades now. Of course, it could just be that it is a very good movie.