Slumdog Millionaire Takes Home 8 Oscars 317
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.
If you're actually interested... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OK, how do I ignore the ENTERTAINMENT section? (Score:3, Informative)
I added this to my /etc/hosts.deny file:
entertainment.slashdot.org
hosts.deny is for listing hosts (and services) to deny connections from. You're thinking of /etc/hosts.
Re:Robbed for the sound oscar? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Robbed for the sound oscar? (Score:4, Informative)
Most live-action movies have overdubbed sound. Not all, but it is the norm. So the difference between a live-action film and an animated film, in terms of creating a soundtrack, is quite small. Both have massive sound effects -- in a live-action film, each footstep, each door opening, each paper crinkling, each jingle of keys, each car passing, and every single uttered syllable, is likely dubed. And even if you do have live sound (which, nominally, you do), there's lots of manipulation that needs to be done to turn it into a soundtrack. Just like with an animated film, except you lack the live sound recording.
Re:Robbed for the sound oscar? (Score:5, Informative)
and every single uttered syllable, is likely dubed.
That's where you lost it. Most sound effects are dubbed, yes, but there's an entire team of people on a film set dedicated to keeping the dialogue clean and usable. Dubbed dialogue can rarely match the intensity of a real, live recording of a scene and using it almost always robs a performance of some quality.
Re:Oscar betrays its Western centerednes (Score:1, Informative)
..slumdog I could not stop thinking that this movie must be incredibly offensive to Indian people
It is, actually. It's an extremely racist and orientalist movie that intentionally degrades and stereotypes/scapegoats Indians in the same way that "Birth of Nation" scapegoated African-Americans, or "Africa Addio" dehumanizing Africans.
Many Indians (both native and diaspora) ranging from Salman Rushdie to Shyamal Sengupta have pointed out these things and criticized this film. Film critic Matthew Schneeberger has likewise criticized the film's stereotyping and scapegoating.
Some rich and powerful Indians who subscribe to the Marxist school of thought (and control much of India's media) have colluded with similar elements in the western-liberal media to glorify this film for the explicit purpose of cultivating racism against the Indian diaspora in western countries (whose relative success they resent).
Re:Not news for nerds. (Score:3, Informative)
I enjoy this sort of story every once in a while too. Here on Slashdot we're more than happy to talk all day about what technology is being used in making films or about Hollywood's often overzealous antipiracy efforts or any number of stories about the Watchmen movie, all of which just reinforce the fact that movies are part of our lives. So if Slashdot wants to toss in a story about the Oscars, which after all happens only once per year, I don't see it being all that big a deal. The way folks are reacting to the story, you'd think that Slashdot had just wholly subsumed the message boards of People magazine or something.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that comparatively few people saw Slumdog Millionaire. Did Slashdot run a story when LOTR: Return of the King won Best Picture, and if so, did everyone still rail against an Oscar-related story being on Slashdot?