'Slumdog' claims eight Oscars
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
LOS ANGELES, Feb 23(Agencies):- Hollywood has met Bollywood at the Academy Awards, and the makers of Oscar champ "Slumdog Millionaire" hope it's a sign of future melding between the US dream factory with its counterparts in India and elsewhere in the world.
A tale of hope amid adversity and squalor in Mumbai, "Slumdog Millionaire" came away with eight Oscars, including best picture and director for Danny Boyle.
The film bagged Oscars for Best Motion Picture (Christian Colson), Directing, Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy), Cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle), Sound Mixing (Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty), Film editing (Chris Dickens), Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Original Song (A.R. Rahman).
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won three Oscars; Art Direction, Makeup, Visual effects.
"Milk" won Oscars for Original Screenplay and Best Actor and The Dark Knight for Best Supporting Actor and Sound editing. Sean Penn was named best actor in a leading performance in Milk.
Sean Penn won his second best-actor Oscar, this one for playing slain gay-rights pioneer Harvey Milk in "Milk," while Kate Winslet took best actress for "The Reader," in which she plays a former concentration camp guard coming to terms with the ignorance that let her heedlessly participate in Nazi atrocities.
Kate Winslet won her first Oscar from six nominations for her performance as Hanna Schmitz, a Nazi prison guard, in The Reader.
Late Heath Ledger won the award for the Best Supporting actor in The Dark Knight. The award was accepted by his parents and sister on behalf of his daughter Matilda.
"Slumdog Millionaire" a low-budget production was a merger of India's brisk Bollywood movie industry, which provided most of the cast and crew, and the global marketing reach of Hollywood, which turned the film into a commercial smash, said British director Boyle.
"We're Brits, really, trapped in the middle, but it's a lovely trapped thing," Boyle said backstage. "You can see it's going to happen more and more. There's all sorts of people going to work there. The world's shrinking a little bit."
It was a theme Oscar voters embraced through the evening with other key awards honoring films fostering broader understanding and compassion.
As expected, Heath Ledger became just the second performer to win an Oscar posthumously, receiving the supporting-actor award for the menace and mayhem he wreaks as Batman villain the Joker in "The Dark Knight." Penelope Cruz was the first Spanish actress to win an Oscar with her supporting prize as a volatile artist in a three-way romance in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."
A tale of hope amid adversity and squalor in Mumbai, "Slumdog Millionaire" came away with eight Oscars, including best picture and director for Danny Boyle.
The film bagged Oscars for Best Motion Picture (Christian Colson), Directing, Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy), Cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle), Sound Mixing (Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty), Film editing (Chris Dickens), Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Original Song (A.R. Rahman).
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won three Oscars; Art Direction, Makeup, Visual effects.
"Milk" won Oscars for Original Screenplay and Best Actor and The Dark Knight for Best Supporting Actor and Sound editing. Sean Penn was named best actor in a leading performance in Milk.
Sean Penn won his second best-actor Oscar, this one for playing slain gay-rights pioneer Harvey Milk in "Milk," while Kate Winslet took best actress for "The Reader," in which she plays a former concentration camp guard coming to terms with the ignorance that let her heedlessly participate in Nazi atrocities.
Kate Winslet won her first Oscar from six nominations for her performance as Hanna Schmitz, a Nazi prison guard, in The Reader.
Late Heath Ledger won the award for the Best Supporting actor in The Dark Knight. The award was accepted by his parents and sister on behalf of his daughter Matilda.
"Slumdog Millionaire" a low-budget production was a merger of India's brisk Bollywood movie industry, which provided most of the cast and crew, and the global marketing reach of Hollywood, which turned the film into a commercial smash, said British director Boyle.
"We're Brits, really, trapped in the middle, but it's a lovely trapped thing," Boyle said backstage. "You can see it's going to happen more and more. There's all sorts of people going to work there. The world's shrinking a little bit."
It was a theme Oscar voters embraced through the evening with other key awards honoring films fostering broader understanding and compassion.
As expected, Heath Ledger became just the second performer to win an Oscar posthumously, receiving the supporting-actor award for the menace and mayhem he wreaks as Batman villain the Joker in "The Dark Knight." Penelope Cruz was the first Spanish actress to win an Oscar with her supporting prize as a volatile artist in a three-way romance in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."