Larry Carpenter

“Slumdog Millionaire” continued its rags-to-riches march through Hollywood’s awards season as its filmmaker, Danny Boyle, won the top honor Saturday from the Directors Guild of America. The win puts Boyle on the inside track for the same prize at the Academy Awards on Feb. 22, since the guild recipient almost always goes on to win the directing Oscar. While “Slumdog Millionaire” started as an underdog that nearly went straight to DVD, it has emerged as the Oscar favorite. Audiences have embraced Boyle’s tale of a poor boy rising to fame and fortune from the streets of Mumbai, and the film triumphed at the Golden ... Read Full Story

“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 ... Read Full Story

After months of watching movies, listening to punditry and seeing critics’ picks, the Oscar race has rounded the final corner and is in the home stretch. Nomination ballots are due at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this week, and the world’s top film awards will be given out on Sunday, Feb. 22, in Hollywood. Most Oscar watchers favor ”Slumdog Millionaire” to take the best motion picture award and its director Danny Boyle to win the directing trophy. Danny gives it the thumbs up. After all, ”Slumdog” has scooped up nearly every other award in sight this Oscar season, and it is ... Read Full Story

There was no way that Danny Boyle, the cutting-edge British director of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later , was going to do a film about a subject as pedestrian as a TV game show. Or so he thought. “The producer sent me the script,” he says of Slumdog Millionaire , which has taken in $56 million at the box office, fetched 10 Oscar nominations and is the current favorite for best picture. “My agent or someone told me it was about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “ But before Boyle could toss it aside, he caught the name of the screenwriter: Simon Beaufoy, ... Read Full Story

Some movies can generate a spellbinding silence: a collective hush of audience anticipation, proof that the film has captured the attention of everyone in the theater. The deadly quiet that Danny Boyle heard in ” Slumdog Millionaire’s” first Hollywood screening was of a very different nature — evidence that his underdog drama faced even longer odds than his film’s uneducated game-show contestant. Boyle and his filmmaking collaborators have said that “Slumdog Millionaire” has enjoyed so much good fortune it is almost as if destiny has guided it toward tonight’s Academy Awards, where the film is a heavy favorite to win the best picture Oscar. ... Read Full Story