Bollywood, Oz beat out U.S. at 2009 Oscars

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- First Wall Street, then the U.S. auto industry, now the Hollywood studios -- wherever you look, the United States is losing its dominance in fields it once owned.

The studios were largely knocked off their perch Sunday by the sweeping success of "Slumdog Millionaire," whose eight Oscars sparked celebration in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.

The celebration was a needed catharsis for the huge city of 14 million people still recovering from the slaughter inflicted on it by fewer than a dozen terrorists in November. It also shined renewed light on the amazing success of the Mumbai movie industry, generally known as Bollywood.

Bollywood sells more tickets per year by far among India's population of more than a billion people than any other movie industry in the world. And its cultural influence extends far further than that -- as far east as Indonesia and down the coast of Africa.

Bollywood's success is based on producing the kind of user-friendly family fare that Hollywood executives, producers, writers and directors are too embarrassed to make anymore. It is a throwback to the days of MGM's "more stars than there are in the heavens" family musicals: "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy sings song. Boy finds girl again." For all its superlative cinematography, acting locations, shooting and writing, "Slumdog Millionaire" is conceptually the true heir of all those myriad crowd-pleasers.

The two areas in which Hollywood remains No. 1 are ultraviolent and sex-filled movies on one hand and ultraexpensive, special-effects-filled, CGI-packed science fiction and superhero action movies on the other. As with the meat-and-potatoes industries of car-making and consumer durables, American moviemakers have abandoned the really important areas on the lower, less pretentious rungs of their creative pyramid, and other countries led by India are eagerly moving in to take up the slack. "Slumdog Millionaire" has plenty of action and violence, but compared with "The Dark Knight," it's "Little House on the Prairie."

It was a sobering Oscar ceremony for Americans in a lot of other ways, too. It was particularly symbolic that Australian Hugh Jackman -- who can go from playing Wolverine in the "X-Men" movie franchise to winning a Tony for playing a gay songster and then be an equally convincing hot-and-heavy romantic action lead to Nicole Kidman in "Australia" -- should have served as master of ceremonies for this least American of Oscar extravaganzas.

It was another great night for the British, led by Kate Winslet, and when the winners weren't Britons, they were Indian, Australian or Spanish. Only one American, Sean Penn, appeared among the four acting awards. And he won, predictably, for "Milk," a politically correct, art-house perfect biopic about the late San Francisco gay activist and martyr Harvey Milk. The movie is excellent, and Penn was outstanding, but it didn't do big business and wasn't the kind of mass-appeal picture that could serve as an industry flagship.

Jackman's fellow Australian, the late Heath Ledger, took another Oscar for his extraordinary performance as the psychotic Joker in "The Dark Knight," a superhero movie darker than most horror flicks and more frightening than the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." It was the first time since Peter Finch won Best Actor for "Network" in 1977 that an Oscar was awarded posthumously.

It was a year in which the Best Picture nominees weren't among the top-grossing films, but despite the growing shadows of the U.S. economic recession, box-office receipts for 2008 were well up on 2007, which had been a disappointing year. Hollywood did well, however, coasting on its caution and creative sterility. The most original and creative movie to prosper was Pixar's wonderful instant classic "WALL-E," which brought home four Oscars, including Best Animated Picture.

Like "WALL-E," "Slumdog Millionaire" suggested a more boisterous and mainstream future for moviemaking. But it is a future that may be created half a world away from the legendary studios and their annual Oscar bash in the Kodak Theatre.