It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win as Best Picture tonight. I believe that not because Entertainment Weekly tells me so, but because Nate Silver does. Frankly, he scares me a little bit.
Now, Slumdog is a fine film, nay, a really, really good film. It is undeniably well-directed by Danny Boyle, and his Best Director Oscar (again, I rely on fivethirtyeight.com) will be a well-deserved accolade. Boyle is a gifted filmmaker who also has the discipline and craftsman's attitude to vault him past the Robert Rodriguez's of the world. I can find little to say against the film. Sure, I've argued that women who look like Frieda Pinto don't need the likes of Dev Patel to rescue them from the slum; a man in a long car would pull up beside her and say, "Hey, would you like to leave the slum?" It's more likely that she would be taking him with her than vice versa, but the movie is a fairy tale and it doesn't treat her as a passive, virginal object of desire. Maybe I'm just jealous. Whatever. I think you can dismiss that gripe as baseless, or at least horribly, horribly shallow.
So what's my beef with the movie? Why would I be just as happy if Milk (not Benjamin Button; please Lord, not that) won? Why am I not rooting for Slumdog? Why am I, truth be told, harboring a little resentment toward it?
Well, I think it's the NPR effect.
What?
The NPR effect. Let me explain. National Public Radio was always just the least offensive alternative to for-profit media; even in its salad days, it wasn't really a rabble-rousing outfit. In the last decade, however, it has been crunched from two sides. Under Kenneth Tomlinson, all public broadcasting was excoriated as demonically liberal. This was a double-edged sword, and both edges cut NPR. First, the corporation became safer, more mainstream, in order to deflect these criticisms. However, Tomlinson's (and others of his ilk) jeremiads also made listening to NPR seem like an act of rebellion to many middle-of-the-road types. In a strange way, the more milk-toasty NPR became the more it was used as a stamp of "outsider" cred to the incurably middle-of-the-road listener. You know them--the people who, at a party, mention something and then conspiratorially whisper, "I heard that on NPR!" Yes, you brave soul, you. Tomorrow, all of us who listen to Morning Edition will be headed for the gulag. Movie studios are not fools, at least not the kind of fools we like to think they are. A movie like Slumdog Millionaire is squarely within the Hollywood rags-to-riches, underdog wins tradition, but start pimping it on NPR and suddenly millions of people think they are making a daring artistic choice by plunking down $8 to see it. I have a neighbor who falls in this demographic; hearing about a movie on NPR means that ipso facto that movie will be good, or at least "quality." It also spares her the work of really learning about cinema or music on her own. She can just trot out her NPR-approved short list. "Slumdog Millionaire? Check. Amadou and Miriam? Check. Now I know everything that's going on in 'independent' cinema and 'world' music."
This is not a diatribe against either Slumdog Millionaire or NPR. The movie is good and I enjoy the radio; it certainly beats listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith on an endless loop of "classic rock" or cramming wacky drive-time DJs into my skull. To be fair, the same "NPR effect" could apply to The Wrestler and to Milk, although less so to the latter, I think. I just get irked when a movie of quality (and I believe Slumdog is quality) becomes a shorthand expression of someone's "edginess." Slumdog is a fine, mid-priced Hollywood movie that is being pimped as "outsider" and "indie" when it's really anything but, and the people who make that possible annoy me. Slumdog's win will seem to me to be a validation of this cynical, lazy marketing-above-all approach.
Still, it's better than Titanic.
