Best Picture prediction: It's 'Slumdog's' night

Each weekday until the Oscars on Sunday, Inquirer film critics Carrie Rickey and Steven Rea will discuss their picks for the winners in one of the six major categories - best supporting actress, best supporting actor, best director, best actor, best actress and best picture.

The nominees for best picture are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire.

Steven: OK, the big enchillada, best picture.... While I found The Curious Case of Benjamin Button curiously unmoving (technically impressive, not boring, but eh), it would be good to remember the 1994 Oscars when Forrest Gump galumphed onto the dais to take best picture over Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show and The Shawshank Redemption. Why? Because Ben Button is essentially a more tricked-out version of Forrest Gump, right down to its quirky misfit hero, its tale of true love, the Southern-fried setting, the hero's friend with a boat and, yes, the same screenwriter: Eric Roth.

Frost/Nixon is a cleverly assembled repackaging of Peter Morgan's play, smartly realized with fine attention to 1970s detail, dress and decor, and Frank Langella anchors it as Tricky Dick. But although the film strives for a Shakespearean dimension, it doesn't quite get there. Director Ron Howard and producer Brain Grazer are familiar faces with the Academy, but not this time.

That leaves Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire. Gus Van Sant's touching bio of the gay rights activist manages to uplift out of tragedy, and that's no small feat - it's an accomplished film, and Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk is one of the finest and most suprising pieces of work in the actor's career. A win for Milk would also send a message to the Proposition 8/anti-gay-union movement, but let's not get political here.

And while Harvey Weinstein wrote the book on Oscar campaigning, it will still be a major upset if his entry, The Reader, emerges victorious Sunday night. I'm not saying it won't happen, but my money is on Slumdog Millionaire - the improbable Mumbai love story, a movie that captures the resilience and energy, the striking disparity between wealth and poverty, in 21st century India. Plus, it's a film that has you leaving the theater feeling good about life and love, even after you've sat there watching brutal interrogation scenes, street orphans being maimed and manipulated, and all the other gross and violent stuff going on in Boyle's Dickensian South Asian yarn. It is written.

Carrie: There are two favored ponies in this race, Ben Button and Slumdog. Frequently where there are two frontrunners a third can force an upset.

Not surprisingly, Button, about a backwards passage through life, has some great passages, particularly at the beginning, where Taraji P. Henson welcomes geezer-baby Benjamin with love and open arms, and in the end where Cate Blanchett says goodbye to the receding newborn. Director David Fincher powerfully crystallizes these life-cycle events, shadowing birth with death and haloing death with life. But great passages do not a great movie make. Much of the longish film felt like a demonstration of what can be done with computer-generated imagery and alas for Fincher, CGI cannot simulate heart. HOWEVER, with $122 million at the box office, Button is the most commercially successful of the five nominated films and after last year's win for No Country for Old Men, the Academy might honor a more mainstream studio effort.

If Button doesn't beat Slumdog, then the most likely spoiler would be Milk, a biopic with stunning performances by Sean Penn and James Franco, and, as you point out, an unusually uplifting tragedy because in changing his life, its doomed hero changed others.

Much as I admire the performances in The Reader and Frost/Nixon, I don't see either of them beating Slumdog. The one about the Nazi who was just following orders and the President hellbent on maintaining order are, like Milk and Button, period pieces lacking the immediacy and urgency of the present-tense Slumdog. If there is one movie that distills 2008, a year of challenges and change and hope in a globalized economy, it is the frisky Slumdog. Bet on it.

Steven: I know how Ben Button could have locked in an Oscar win: If Brad Pitt's aging-backwards hero had digitally inserted himself into Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader - and he could have, because Mr. Button was alive and kicking through most of the 20th century. If only Cate and Tilda hadn't distracted him! It would have been an epic crossover coup that makes last week's Grey's Anatomy/Private Practice conjoined episodes look like, well, mere TV.

Anyway, seriously, we're in accord here: It's Slumdog's night.

Carrie: What can a 'Slumdog' possibly know? As Jamal, the film's hero, says, "The answers."