Tonight are the Academy Awards. The anticipated winners are Slumdog Millionaire (for Best Picture), Mickey Rourke (Best Actor, for The Wrestler), and Kate Winslett (Best Actress, for The Reader, a role about which mom and dad raved).
Slumdog Millionaire was my favorite movie of 2008, but it’s been criticized recently as “poverty porn,” and that’s making me question my response to it.
In this week’s New Yorker, Katherine Boo writes about the “airport slums” in Mumbai – in particular, an area called Gautam Nagar.
Boo focuses her story on a 13-year old named Sunil who steals scrap metal for food money.
Set in the context of the opening-night-premiere-in-India of Slumdog, the story is incredibly depressing: this boy is facing a cruel world completely on his own and turning to crime out of physical necessity.
The article is definitely a contrast to the somewhat romanticized view of the slums in the movie. I am going to need to do some more thinking about whether there's something "wrong" about the movie.
