"Slumdog Millionaire" -- a love story that combines artistic ambition with broad commercial appeal -- won a leading eight Oscars on Sunday night, including the best picture trophy.
While the film's triumphs at the 81st annual Academy Awards marked an amazing outcome for a movie filled with subtitles, scenes of torture and a Bollywood dance sequence, the wins also cemented the reputation of distributor Fox Searchlight, which has become Hollywood's top advocate of the kind of daring works that movie studios have all but abandoned.
Director Danny Boyle's fictional account of a Mumbai orphan's surprising winning streak on India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" also won Oscars for direction, adapted screenplay, cinematography, editing, original score, original song and sound mixing.
The wins for the film -- produced by a British company, co-financed by a French distributor and made by a largely Indian cast and crew -- dramatized the global compass reading of contemporary movie production, as other top Oscar winners showed.
The best supporting actress winner was Spain's Penelope Cruz for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"; Australian actor Heath Ledger was posthumously named best supporting actor for "The Dark Knight"; and British star Kate Winslet won best actress for "The Reader." The only acting winner with a U.S. birth certificate: Sean Penn, who played the title character in "Milk."
Host Hugh Jackman opened the broadcast with a song and dance routine about the economic recession, and though he didn't reference Hollywood cost-cutting specifically, belt-tightening was very much a part of the Oscar ceremony backdrop.
In a show business shakeup that has cost scores of film executives their jobs and left numerous movies in limbo, studios are scaling back not only on provocative dramas but also on the companies they established to produce and distribute them.
In the last year, Warner Bros. closed its two specialty film divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (the original distributor of "Slumdog Millionaire") and Picturehouse, while Paramount closed the doors of its Paramount Vantage unit. ThinkFilm, a leading distributor of nonfiction films, has vanished, and the Weinstein Co. has scaled way back.
At the same time, the big movie studios are steering clear of highbrow literary dramas, aiming their resources at mass-appeal works including family-friendly animation, superhero stories and established franchises such as James Bond and Harry Potter.
