'Millionaire' strikes gold. Can it be stopped?

After Saturday night's Producers Guild dinner at the Hollywood Palladium, where "Slumdog Millionaire" won the Darryl F. Zanuck award for outstanding motion picture achievement of the year, I told some Fox Searchlight publicists that their award season gravy train probably would get derailed at the Screen Actors Guild Awards the next night. It seemed unlikely the actors guild would honor a cast comprised of Indian thesps, little-known in America,   with their top award for ensemble cast (often thought to be SAG's version of best picture) especially against casts from movies like "Benjamin Button," "Doubt," "Frost/Nixon" and the one I thought might win, "Milk." But I predicted that if they pull off SAG, it's all over. They can just skip the other precursor award banquets and send for the awards they will inevitably win.

Guess what?

So "Slumdog Millionaire," the indisputable front runner for Oscar, pulls it off and people like Dev Patel, Freida Pinto and Anil Kapoor all have brand-new "Actor" statuettes to play with. It's an important victory.

SAG is where "Crash" managed to halt the "Brokeback Mountain" momentum by picking off a key guild victory on its way to an Oscar upset over the seemingly unstoppable momentum of Ang Lee's groundbreaking drama. A victory by any of the others could have drastically changed the inevitable enviable headlines that  "Slumdog" is going to continue to generate after back to back guild victories this weekend from the producers and the actors. The DGA follows on Jan. 31, the WGA on Feb. 7  and BAFTA on Feb 8.  A major "Slumdog" defeat at any of them could give us pause, but right now the odds are overwhelming. It is becoming clear Hollywood is determined to honor a movie just about all of the executives voting would have (or did) reject.

Even a front page Los Angeles Times story on Saturday gauging Indian reaction to "Slumdog" probably won't do any damage, even though a Mumbai film professor was quoted negatively calling it a "white man's  imagined India. It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close. It's a poverty tour."

At the PGA party Searchlight President Peter Rice  (who's getting thanked more than the Lord at award shows these days) told us he could have "lived without" the story, but director Danny Boyle was said to be fine with it.  Publicists for rival films were trying to stir things up by spreading the same story late last week, but in fact any reaction to it probably will be tempered by the news just e-mailed to us from one of Fox's award consultants, pointing out that "Slumdog" is indeed turning out to be a rags to riches story at the Indian box office. It's had the third biggest opening day ever for any Hollywood studio release (after "Spider-Man 3" and "Casino Royale"),  drawing great press reviews and a 33% increase Friday to Saturday. Its expansion in the U.S. this weekend after 10 Oscar nominations made $10 million ($1 mil for each nom?), putting it in fifth for the weekend with $55 million so far. $100 million will be a cinch and the sky's the limit.

The rest of the awards results from a big weekend of trying to read guild tea leaves were predictable (I got four out of four of SAG's individual film categories right). Heath Ledger is such a lock that two of the other nominees in the supporting category, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Downey Jr. weren't even there. The supporting winner, Kate Winslet for "The Reader," also seemed obvious, and unlike her breathless excitement at the Globes two weeks earlier, she seemed restrained and concise in her brief thank you. Now the performance will be judged in lead categories at BAFTA and the Oscars, two organizations who refused to buy into her camp's supporting campaign for what was obviously a leading role.

Winslet's loss to "Doubt's" Meryl Streep in the lead actress race was not a surprise to me either. SAG wasn't gonna give Kate two of them, "Revolutionary Road" is not a popular picture among many voters, and Streep was the clear beneficiary. The two winning performances will now go head to head on an even playing field, and it will be interesting to see if Streep's joyous, infectious and altogether charming acceptance at SAG wins her any new converts and turns the best actress Oscar race into a genuine contest. Streep's triumphant run to the stage and her unbridled enthusiasm would make you think this was the first time the 15 time Oscar nominee and two time winner had ever gotten an award. The SAG showcase and heartfelt standing ovation is gonna register. She hasn't won an Oscar in 27 years. If Miramax can get that across, it's a horse race.

As for Sean Penn's "Milk" win, it gives the Big 'Mo Mickey Rourke got at the Globes back to Penn, who will have to be regarded as the front-runner -- at least for now.  It was sad to see "Frost/Nixon's" Frank Langella lose again. His face in the SAG audience told the whole story. Like Streep and Ledger, Penn also received a standing ovation. His comments about the media wishing for a dog fight between himself and Mickey were amusing (Rourke was reported on some sites to have e-mailed a reporter that he didn't think much of his friend, Penn's performance in "Milk"), but for his part Rourke could not have been more complimentary toward Penn in his red carpet interviews and in fact has been all season long. Blame any negative vibes on the rumor-mongering Perez Hiltonistas in the press. It's sport.

Interesting to note the usually press-shy Brad Pitt was everywhere on the red carpet at SAG, speaking even to TV Guide Channel and one of the vapid personalities at E!, where he deflected her dopey line of personal questioning ("How have you made Angelina more of a woman?") by amusingly obsessing on their "Glam Cam."  Clearly since his best actor Oscar nomination Thursday, he's decided to ramp up the attention for "Benjamin Button" in any way he can.

At Saturday's PGA pre-cocktail party, I asked Academy President Sid Ganis, who is hoping for big(ger) ratings this year, if he was disappointed "The Dark Knight" didn't grab a best picture Oscar nomination. He said movies nominated and not nominated will be generously represented on the telecast no matter what. His wife, Nancy, chimed in by saying she was disappointed "Iron Man" wasn't in the big five! Ganis is really excited about the direction new producers Bill Condon and Laurence Mark are taking with this year's Oscarcast and says it is going to be very different and exciting.

Also at the PGA event I ran into Oscar-winning producer Mark Johnson ("Rain Man"), who  heads the acad's foreign language committee and instituted all the controversial changes into the voting procedures over the last few years. He said that despite criticism in some quarters that the Italian Grand Prize Cannes winner "Gomorrah" was left off the final five (and nine for that matter), he is thrilled with the nominee list they have and thinks it is very hard to quibble with the overall quality of this year's contenders. In other words no completely embarrassing omissions like last year's Cannes winner, "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" or "City of God," so expect the new system to stay in place for the foreseeable future.

For the first time, the general committee picked six semifinalists, while Johnson's small executive committee chose three more to make sure the over list of nine  represented the best in world cinema. Although he won't confirm which three they added, you can probably be sure one of them was France's Palme d'Or winner "The Class," which didn't play as well as it might have with the larger group.  This terrific film is now one of the five nominees (along with Austria's "Revanche," Japan's "Departures," Israel's "Waltz With Bashir" and Germany's "The Baader Meinhof Complex"). Its fortunate inclusion is most likely thanks to the new system.

But as award season chugs into its final stretch, the one "foreign" film that's really on Oscar's radar is the most unlikely champ of all, "Slumdog Millionaire." After this golden weekend, it has its eye on the prize more than ever.

-- Pete Hammond

Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[c]

you are an idiot! They are not "little known" actors, they are international superstars! what are you, besides being wrong, and an idiot?

[kiran]

I dont know why the adult cast of slumdog is being given any importance. they didnt do anything for the movie,.. it was the children who set the stage for this movie to become what it has become.. they did all the work and now they have been left alone so adults could bask in the glory.. this is sad tragic and utterly irresponsible of the producers and director not to bring children along when they are accepting accolades. Typical Indian thinking!!

[kiran]

It is sooo sad to see that the child cast of slumdog is being ignored when they were the ones who did everything for this movie.. the movie became what it is because of those children... if you have seen the movie, you know its true and they are the ones who deserve to attend award ceremonies and not frieda and dev who did little or nothing performance wise.. I would NEVER EVER.. want to see those adults winning any performance awards because they did not do anything.. it was the younger cast,... I wish Indians had enough sense of fairness and justice to tecognize the contributions of the young cast and brought them along on award ceremonies.. its sad to see that in a country that cliams to be a democracy,. small children are denied of their fair chance at receiving accolades simply because they are young and cannot speak for themselves... I think they should sue the director and producer along with adult cast for ignoring their work when they did everything to make this movie a success...
I can now see that India is really an ignorant country of selfish opportunists!!

[FLN]

put a lid on it people...they are children living in INDIA and going to school at the moment, unlike child actors over here that's dragged all over the place in the name of advertising the movie, and besides parents approval is strong in Asian culture and I can see why this could be one of the reason they aren't touring around with the "big" kids. They have 11 SAG awards, all will be given to those that are in the movies---all the kids---so cool it, you guys make it sound like the movie studio is robbing them or something just because they aren't present. That said, I do hope to see everyone (all the kids + the older brother) present at the Academy Award (the most important one of all). But should the kids be absent, I'll be a bit disappointed but I'm not going to go into a rampage like the kids been robbed just because they weren't there...AND I happen to think the adult cast was GREAT, there is no weak link for acting in this movie, granted no exceptional link but no weak link either...

[NR]

I agree. The kids ought to be there at least for the Oscars cause I think the kids did an amazing job.. why not a special award for them?

[Robert]

I think Danny should give the child actors some money and glory. I liked the child actors more than the adults I would like to see them. And adults are just shameless to never mention about the kids.

[what a joke]

Since when is Brad Pitt press shy?