Nothing against this film, I haven’t seen it. But doesn’t the U.S. make enough worthy motion pictures of its own each year, without what is essentially a foreign film being accorded Best Picture?

As I said, I’ve not seen ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ Nor do I intend to. I just wish the Academy had honored this film in another category. Didn’t we used to have a ‘Foreign Films’ section in these awards shows?

At least ‘Best Supporting Actor’ went to the right man. It was a bittersweet victory for the memory Heath Ledger, in a fairer world he would have been here to receive it himself last Sunday night.

I didn’t realize that there was some grand social message in the film.  It just seemed like a well told story to me, and it was based on a novel. 

Just because the whining masses of Western Snivelization take themselves so seriously doesn’t mean that the rest of the world must do the same.

Again, i got no impression that a message was being sent through the film, rather a fictional story being told.  I read Charlotte’s Web as a kid and didn’t end up believing that pigs talk to spiders.

Like “City Of God” before it, Slumdog relies on a new kind of third-world hokum. Of course, the love-conquers-all story is a fairy tale, but so is its characterization of the depravity of the Mombai underclass, and the lawlessness of the police. This is not the romanticized Dickensian world of the Artful Dodger. Just a grimy, pedestrian scrim, void of meaning and metaphorical dimension - a drab rat’s maze through which our would-be lovers scurry and huddle for the viewer’s amusement. In the end, it’s the film’s upbeat M.I.A.-meets-Bhangra tunes that do most of the hard work of clueing us in to the film’s aspirations as a fairly straightforward curry-flavored pop fantasy.

Apparently, we are extremely susceptible to these jejune depictions of strange and exotic lands. Just look how eagerly we bought into the neocon tableau vivant of Iraq and Iran as the wellspring of all things evil. No doubt it is the reptilian fear of the “other” at work here.

[Apologies to those who already read this on another thread. It seemed just as appropriate here]