On Slumdog
- Alessandro Pennini
- Sep 15, 2016
- 6 min read
People thought the world was going to end on December 21st, 2012 but I contend that it actually ended much earlier on February 22nd 2009, the night when Slumdog Millionaire won eight Academy Awards.
Few people seem to realise the world ended, fewer still remember that Slumdog Millionaire won at all but I never forgot. For me, it was a perfect cultural moment that defined my teenage experience. A lot of talk gets put around now about what are defining moments in a young man’s life. Most will answer getting their first car, losing their virginity, happy moments with friends. Perhaps some will answer with a defining sporting moment or a great theatrical performance and people often ask if these events define a teenagers psyche. I’d say yes, mine was shaped by two things: the return of King of Queens to primetime television and the 81st Academy Awards and the dubious honor goes to the Oscars for making me realise that even the brightest and best of film scholars are just as easily duped as the rest of the film going public.
Never underestimate how deeply you can be disappointed and never underestimate the ability of general public to lavish praise on the adequate and average.
2008 was a year where I was attempting to expand my film knowledge. I’d just seen Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey for the first time and after, I turned to my dad and said “What was all that about?”. My film education was broad: A Fish Called Wanda, Le Samourai, Blade Runner, Citizen Kane. I sat glued to the screen with my parents. I started to pick up on the patterns and tropes, conventions, I knew from the minute I started watching whether a film was good or bad. The dialogue, the story, how it used all those tropes; you do something for long enough and it just comes to you. Dog shows up in a film? Dead. Explosion? Out run it. First girl on screen? Love interest.
But the Academy Awards: Why did I watch it? I was young and naïve, I didn’t know any better. I’d settled in for the long night to see who would win that coveted golden statue. Much like the Melbourne Comedy Gala, you get sucked into watching these things on TV with the promise of a Grand Finale, and it is held hostage from you till the very end to ensure you stay glued to that screen for when someone from Seinfeld shows up. The Academy Awards have never been good or even important, but I was young!
It started off slowly. Award for something or other…Slumdog Millionaire. Lovely gesture, thought I, getting a few of the sound awards or editing. Then another award. And another. By the fourth award I felt sick and by the fifth I was watching the awards from the bathroom.
That film won eight Academy Awards. It won Best Film. As I cleaned up the mess from the bathroom floor and dizzyingly crawled into bed the question became simply: why? How? Why did Slumdog Millionaire even win in the first place?
Best Picture is by definition, the best. There is no other picture that was better than the one they picked, this single film was the ‘best’ film of the year. I could trot out a dictionary definition for you but we surely know what best means. To be the best is to be better than anyone else, superior, exceptional.
In that year, we had such films like Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and of all those strong contenders, we decided that Slumdog Millionaire was the strongest. We sat back and said “yeah, sure whatever” as a literal crime happened before us. The signs were there and we just didn’t listen, much like in disaster films when dogs start barking and all the animals live. I tried to show my grandfather Slumdog Millionaire but he died before I could show it to him. I don’t blame him, I’d have done the same.
In all honesty, this isn’t a new development. It’s not the first year the Oscars have screwed up. In fact, you can go all the way back to the beginning and count them. The noticeable award snubs have been charted throughout history:
1979, Apocalypse Now loses to Kramer vs Kramer.
1980, Raging Bull loses to Ordinary People.
1988, Mississippi Burning loses to Rain Man…I don’t mind Rain Man so this isn't too bad.
1990, Goodfellas loses to Dances with Wolves.
1997, both LA Confidential and Good Will Hunting lose to Titanic.
And of course, the absolute mother lode, in 1998 the seminal Terence Malick film The Thin Red Line loses to Shakespeare in Love.
Usually in a democracy, we can blame the millions of ‘other people’ responsible for stuff like this. We always consider everyone else to be the ‘other people’ or the ‘rest’. But since the public doesn’t vote in the Oscars – thank god for that – it comes down to the famous panel of Academy Award judges.
Apparently comprised of a pile of decomposing corpses, the judges usually death spasm towards films that are considered safe bets. I say death spasm, but they are corpses that never truly lived. At this point I imagine the Academy Award judges to be the real life equivalent of Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars; reaching greasy hands into a bucket full of films like The King’s Speech and Slumdog while brilliant films like Frost/Nixon and their like walk the plank into a Sarlaac pit.
It’s often remarked about films being Oscar Bait: you know, historical drama, period pieces, usually films about a human overcoming something or the Nazi’s are in it or it’s in black and white. If the film is all three, they might as well just give that film the Oscar before it’s even made.
But bait and hooks aside the question is simply this: who actually liked Slumdog Millionaire? I don’t know anyone who did then and now, many years later, no one confesses to it. I feel like an alien landed and wiped everybody’s memory of this event, much like when everyone started enjoying Pitbull and Honey Boo Boo.
And before you claim the literary form is superior to the celluloid one, I read the book which Slumdog Millionaire was based upon, Q&A, which was barely tolerable at best. It’s the sort of thing you’d pick up from the airport, read once and abandon at a hotel reading rack. It is a contrived mess of a thing, written by numbers, a book that I think was published only so it could be turned into a film. It just dissolves upon contact with brain matter, there’s nothing to think about with that book.
Does the author seriously expect me to sympathize with this kid? This kid is a blatant unapologetic liar and a cheat. Look, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief higher than a circus wire and I’ll accept that maybe all that stuff mentioned in the questions happened to him in real life. But do you really expect me to believe it all happened in the same order as the questions? How little disregard do you have the reader? Do you take me for some mouth breathing dip-stick from the boondocks? What amazing characters do you remember from that book? What was the moral of the story, aside from go on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and have chance decide all the questions for you?
Yes, it was a book. It was certainly that and that’s my review for the back. No doubt about it, pages and all, a real book indeed. If I could damn a book with faint praise anymore, I would.
During the time of Slumdog, I tried to tell people of the truth behind Slumdog Millionaire: that it was shit. People just wouldn’t have a bar of anything I said about, you point it out and all of a sudden you’re that guy. You’re the guy who doesn’t like the movie the Oscars chose, getting up on Facebook to defend the losing film, you’re the Shannon Noll to a Guy Sebastian. I was a buzz-kill, a joyless coal powered automaton, a guardian of goodtaste. All your valid complaints are stopped by two roadblocks: representation and feel-good.
In regards to representation, I feel so many of these films come across as either the classic white savior narrative or the fact that audiences perceive anything that is slightly gritty or realistic as representation.
And people who claim Slumdog Millionaire was heartwarming and feel-good clearly forget half the stuff that happens in that film like children being blinded for life, someone falling from a moving train, a kid almost drowning in feces, the main characters brother being machine-gunned to death in a bathtub.
Feel-good is hardly a reason to watch something and most certainly not a reason to give an award to a movie. If we’re giving out awards to movies for eliciting feelings then we’ve surely reached an all-time low for expectations. But hey, Jai Ho right?
...right?
Recent Posts
See All
The firs time I felt old, I was twenty-one years old. It happened at the counter of a bar in Melbourne’s north that’s quickly becoming...
Yorumlar