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Slumdog Millionaire Takes Home 8 Oscars
Ben Burtt was robbed of his overly deserved Oscars for the sound on Wall-E, and Heath Ledger's Joker unsurprisingly got a posthumous statue, but the big winner for the night was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire with Picture, Director, Song, and five others. Go ahead movie nerds: talk amongst yourself.
Every year that goes by the Oscars become more of a farce.
Slumdog was the most cheesy and predictable film i have seen in years. The screenplay seemed like it was written by a 3 year old, the acting was horrendous, and you knew exactly how the film would end after about 8 minutes into it.
Oh no! You were exposed to the same information from two different sources!
Call homeland security! This gross indecency must end!
I was wondering that myself. My girlfriend made me sit through part of the Oscars last night and at one point some clueless celebrity started gushing about how the Oscar is the "most prestigious award in the world". Really? More prestigious than the Nobel prize? More prestigious than the Medal of Honor or Victoria Cross?
Give me a fucking break. I'll never understand the fascination that a lot of my countrymen have with Hollywood and the culture surrounding movie stars/other celebrities.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Movie nerds are among the largest classes of nerds, dude.
In that clueless celebrity's world, it is the the "most prestigious award in the world." Do you really think she will ever get the Nobel Prize? Highly doubtful. Just let her enjoy her clueless life and go on with yours.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I may be missing something, but how is it that difficult to do sound for an animated film? I would say if anyone was robbed regarding sound-related categories it was slumdog millionaire. With animation you have all the time in the world to do the sound effects any way you want. Some of the scenes in slumdog were shot on handicams in crowded slums by comparison; how many times can you redo a take with thousands of extras and still achieve some sort of continuity?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Celebrities live in a different world. It's kinda like a snow globe filled with lithium and cocaine. In their world it is the most prestigious award.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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I dunno, I actually enjoy news articles like this sometimes. It's a welcome surprise from all the Linux zealotry/Microsoft bashing this site is used to.
Movie nerds are among the largest classes of nerds, dude.
Okay, fair point. But I just figured that /. was implicitly News for Technology Nerds; not other kinds of nerdiness.
We had this same argument during the earthquake in China over the summer. If you don't want to see this on the front page, use the firehose to mod it down. If you're using the beta index, mod it down so you don't see it. It's News For Nerds. Stuff that Matters. To many, this does matter. Not all of us participate in online forums (specifically that work doesn't block during the day) and it's nice to discuss it.
Just because this article doesn't pertain to your interests doesn't mean you have to come in and troll it. There's also many kinds of Technologies that go behind making movies from the start to finish.
I don't have any interest in the Mars Lander, but I don't go in trolling ABOUT THOSE DAMN NASAHOLES and how JUNIOR CANT READ GIVE THEM MONEY. Get over yourself and scroll down, it's not that big of an inconvenience to ignore one article.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Even more than the AVN awards?
What is this new trend for everybody who has any kind of interest calling themselves "nerds" or "geeks"? I heard some beautiful person on TV the other day describing themselves as a "Musical Theatre Geek". WTF?
My current theory is that this is a nice way of bragging that "I know loads about this". By saying you're a "geek" it makes it sound like you're being humble about it.
Seriously though, I was proud of being a geek/nerd when it meant being a computery person who is passionate about science and technology and who therefore sometimes seems odd to people who are not into those things. However, if the word "nerd" has come to mean anybody with any kind of interest, it seems a bit of a lame and meaningless term.
And yet it doesn't say Technology on the site header.
What would be appropriate content for the entertainment department in your opinion? I'm honestly asking here, as a movie/tech/gaming nerd I'm curious.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
In any case, if it's by Microsoft I automatically hate it, and if it's for Linux I definitely love it.
Ubuntu on primary work desktop since Dapper Drake (2006).
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Would Slumdog have been even noticed had it not been made by a British Director? Thousands of movies have been made about poverty in India. They get as much attention as movies made about drugs in American cities. People deal with this shit in their everyday life and dont want to watch it when they pay to enter a theater for some relaxation. Only people who have never seen poverty get their rocks off by watching something like Slumdog. Then again probably why Rambo and Die Hard were so popular outside the States was that guns are a big deal in countries with gun control.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I'm glad to see him finally get some recognition. But honestly, he should have won for Shallow Grave or Trainspotting (his best films). The Oscars are too conservative and often don't recognize filmmakers until they're way past their prime (like Spielberg and James Cameron, who didn't win Oscars until their best work was actually long behind them). The Independent Spirit Awards are much better, IMHO. And they're much more likely to recognize the work of young and audacious filmmakers. The Oscars almost never recognize first time directors, no matter how brilliant their debut work. Chris Nolan, for example, deserved and Oscar for Memento. But it took a Batman sequel for him to even get slightly acknowledged.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why do you know when Brittany's tour kicks off? Hell, I didn't know she was out of the loony bin yet.
And I don't see why people are bitching about a thread about the Oscars. Plenty of nerds enjoy movies. If you do not like movies, you could simply NOT CLICK ON THE FUCKING ARTICLE. That's what I do when I come across an article that doesn't interest me, I don't read it (and therefore don't create a whiney post complaining about it either).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
The main Academy Awards may not be news for nerds, but the Sci-Tech Awards are certainly full of /. fodder.
- Jasen.
The Oscars are a bunch of MAFIAA types stroking themselves, and assuming (with the complicity of the media) that the entire fucking world cares about it.
When we give/get awards, it's in the family.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The Nobel Prize awards would mean more if they were not given out until there was someone of worth to award it to. Instead they are given out regularly, as if the world continuously produces people worthy of the awards. The more often they give them out, the more it is like being one of the 40 million high school queens at the prom each year. Now, if there were only one prom Queen for all the high schools in the USA each year... now that would be special.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I quite agree with you.
I actually lost any respect for the Nobel Prize a long time ago, shortly after first learning about them and being mighty impressed,
I went through the list of the laureates.
To my surprise, I did not find Gandhi.
Instead I found that he was nominated five times, but was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now I can accept the last omission, as that was within the rules of only living people being eligible and he was assassinated after being nominated for the fifth time, but I could never accept the other four times.
There have been many other problems with the awards and omissions of them, but I still feel that this was the worst blunder of them all.
Right? I sometimes don't think that people really appreciate Slashdot when it comes to that stuff. Overall, you'll get a better discussion and less bullshit on Slashdot than many other sites of this nature.
Some of it has to do with the fact that the readership for Slashdot has gotten older along with the site, and some of it is that sites like Digg.com have sprung up to pull away a lot of the kiddies.
It's not all roses here, but I continue to use Slashdot because you actually can get some decent discussions going here, and there's a lot of actually funny responses too.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The Nobel Prize has been inflated in the minds of some (with help from the media, no doubt) to be far more than it is. It is not designed to be awarded to people who just make mind-blowing life-changing discoveries. Nobel's will specifically stated that it be awarded annually:
The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind
It then goes on to stipulate what categories each award is for.
So, the Nobel Prize was originally intended to simply be sort of a "man of the year" competition in various fields, and was supposed to pertain to work that was done during the preceding year. In that spirit, Gore's prize was proper, since he was being awarded for stuff he had done during the previous year, while those prizes given to scientists for discoveries made years or decades earlier were technically in violation of Nobel's original intent, since it was supposed to reward only work done during the preceding year.
If the Nobel Prize was awarded as a "Man of the Year in x field" rather than "person who made earth-shattering discoveries in x field", you wouldn't have near the controversy it always seems to generate.
I think Brian Williams put it best about the Oscars during Friday's newscast:
"It's the day where the west coast pretends what they do actually matters."
Apu was robbed!!!
That's nothing new, really. The Kwik-E-Mart gets robbed all the time.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The term "substantial" trust fund, coming from the same person saying that the few hundred quid the kids got paid is a lot because it is three times the average salary of someone living in the slum, doesn't mean much, does it? Also the trust fund will be available to the children actors only if they stay in school until they are 18. Too bad that until then they will be living on one meal a day in makeshift shacks, one can only wonder if they will last until their 18th birthday to enjoy the "substantial" amount of money that has been put aside for them. Interesting, that Fox doesn't setup funds like that for their child actors in the States...
Yes, let's all be merry and celebrate the distributor's generosity. The fact is, that the kids still live in tents while the movie is making copious amounts of money (almost 160 000 000 $ so far).
Also, the diffusion of responsibility is a wonderful thing: those guys made more, those guys made less, those guys just work here, those guys have mortgages to pay and those just followed orders.
The Oscars have nothing to do with the MPAA or RIAA. The Oscars are the entertainers themselves nominating and awarding themselves. The votes are from current members of the actors and director's guilds (unions) and other members of the entertainment industry. They have nothing to do with the AA's other than the fact that the actor's and director's don't get paid when you pirate.
Was Slumdog the co-creation of an Indian director who is not getting sufficient credit? Or is it a Western director degrading India for profit? Both criticisms cannot be simultaneously true.
The idea that Slumdog Millionaire "degrades" India is offensive. It implies that any movie that shows the negative aspects of a society is inherently degrading. Thoughts like that come from a perspective that we have to treat some countries like "special" children--keep them from all harm and make sure they wear their helmet and kneepads all the time. Give me a break. No one would be complaining if this exact same movie was set in the U.S., where there are plenty of slums and gangsters and game shows. That betrays a subtle racism of low expectations toward India. In comparison I do not recall similar outcry when Western filmmakers began to use Hong Kong cast, crew, and concepts to make movies.
India has slums and violence, as many, many Indian movies have portrayed. Note that much of the production and acting crew of SM come directly from the Indian film industry, and are happy about their work in the movie. Including the Indian co-director.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.