Slumdog Millionaire wins 20 more awards
Fox Searchlight release,won six awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Score (Rahman) – from the San Diego Film Critics Society.
Shot in Mumbai, the film tells the heart warming story of an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who goes on to win a staggering Rs 20 million ($420,000) on India’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? game show.
It won six other awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Breakout on Camera (Dev), and Best Performance by a Youth – Male (Ayush) from the Phoenix Film Critics Society.
Dev plays the protagonist Jamal as a teenager, while Ayush plays Jamal in his childhood.
The film, which has been named in Time magazine’s list of Top Ten Films of 2008, won Best Picture and Best Director awards from the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association as well as Best Director and Best Screenplay from the Houston Film Critics Society.
The St. Louis Film Critics Association gave it the Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film awards, while the Southeastern Film Critics Association chose it for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
It has also earned six nominations for the Chicago Film Critics Awards, including Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Score, and Most Promising Performer (Dev).
British director Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has picked up 20 more awards this week, including those for Indian music director A R Rahman, British Indian actor Dev Patel and child artiste Ayush Mahesh Khedekar.
Sarah Brightman’s hot gossip
While Brightman, now 48, can still pack ‘em in in the States – her new world tour involves holographic sets, and requires her to change costume on stage, sing on top of a pile of plush mattresses, and perch on a precariously high swing – she can’t quite pull it off in her homeland. She insists that doesn’t worry her, that she sees the world as a global village.
But one suspects that the main problem is that, to the British, Brightman is forever frozen in a timewarp: she remains that fabulous singer who married the rich bloke.
In the intervening years, Brightman has sold more than 26 million albums and two million DVDs in 34 countries, with a musical style that fuses opera, pop and jazz. She still packs stadiums, and for several years running was the highest-selling British artist in the US, shifting more records than Elton John or the Rolling Stones.
And though she doesn’t hanker after her Hot Gossip days, she has a healthy respect for the openings it offered. Tomorrow, she releases her 12th solo album, A Winter Symphony, a collection of festive classics that includes In The Bleak Midwinter, Silent Night and – somewhat questionably – Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day.
Sarah Brightman struts on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, draped head to toe in antique lace – rather like a latter-day Miss Haversham with attitude. As the music soars, she strips off the layers and veils to reveal thigh-high, silver glitter boots and a matching sparkly miniskirt. A-ha! Hold on a moment. Rewind. Haven’t we seen something like this before?
The following day, Brightman, now demurely dressed in a little black shift and matching cardi (albeit vamped up a notch with over-the-knee black platform boots), laughs uproariously. “I know, I know, it’s all a bit Starship Trooper,” she giggles.
