Slumdog Millionaire

'Slumdog Millionaire' scores 8 Oscars - 02/22/2009 11:41:25 PM MST.

"Slumdog Millionaire" completed its improbable journey from the poverty of Mumbai to Oscar gold Sunday night, winning eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.

The cross-cultural drama, about a Mumbai teen whose hard-knock life provides the answers he needs to succeed on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," was the toast of the night at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.

"Slumdog" producer Christian Colson accepted the Best Picture Oscar amid dozens of cast and crew members, most of them flown in from India. "As you can see, our film was a collaboration between hundreds of people," Colson said.

In their acceptance speeches, both Colson and Danny Boyle, who won the Oscar for Best Director, praised the people of Mumbai. "They dwarf even this guy," Boyle said, pointing to his statuette.

Besides the Oscars for Best Picture and director, "Slumdog Millionaire" won awards for Simon Beaufoy's adapted screenplay and A.R. Rahman's Bollywood-inflected score and original song, as well as editing, cinematography and sound mixing.

"Milk," the moving biography of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, won two major awards -- for its original screenplay and for Sean Penn's soulful portrayal of Milk.

"You commie homo-loving sons-of-guns," Penn said mockingly to the Kodak audience. Penn, in a speech that included mentions of President Barack Obama and fellow nominee Mickey Rourke, admonished those who voted to ban gay marriage in California last November.

"We've got to have equal rights for everyone," Penn said.

"Milk" screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, in his acceptance speech, recalled growing up gay in a Mormon family when he first heard about Milk's accomplishments. "It gave me the hope to live my life," Black said. "It gave me the hope one day I could live my life openly as who I am and then maybe even I could even fall in love and one day get married."

Kate Winslet won Best Actress for her portrayal of a woman who seduces a teen -- and is later put on trial for her role as a Nazi concentration-camp guard -- in "The Reader."

Winslet said she had practiced some version of her Oscar speech for years. "I was 8 years old, staring into the bathroom mirror, and this [statuette] would be a shampoo bottle," Winslet said. "Well, it's not a shampoo bottle now."

Awards for supporting performances went to Penelope Cruz, playing an unstable lover in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," and the late Heath Ledger's manic turn as Batman's archnemesis, The Joker, in "The Dark Knight."

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the story of a man born old and aging backward, went into Oscar night with a leading 13 nominations. It left with three wins, for art direction, visual effects and make-up.

On a night when most of the award winners were predictable, the surprises came from the ceremony itself. First-time producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon pulled out some fascinating surprises in an exhilarating show.

Host Hugh Jackman led a show filled with musical numbers -- including an off-the-wall medley paired with Beyonce Knowles -- and light on extraneous movie-clip montages. The acting nominees were instead toasted, and occasionally roasted, by actors who had won in past years. Other categories were cleverly grouped to depict the steps necessary to make a movie, starting with the screenplay, then craftspeople, then post-production, and so on.

The night's winners:

• Slumdog Millionaire - 8 oscars
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - 3 oscars
• Milk - 2 oscars
• The Dark Knight - 2 oscars
• The Reader - 1 oscar
• WALL-E - 1 oscar
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona - 1 oscar
• The Duchess - 1 oscar
• La Maison en Petits Cubes - 1 oscar
• Smile Pinki - 1 oscar
• Okuribito - 1 oscar
• Man on Wire - 1 oscar
• Spielzeugland - 1 oscar

Weathering the storm

The check-list presented by Rajendra K Aneja (Khaleej Times, Dubai, 14.02.2009) to beat the current recession was impressive, and ought to be put into practice immediately by the consumer at large. The check-list:

Save as much money as possible.
Spend less on frivolities, clothes.
Keep physically fit, trim.
Stop all wastage.
Take care of investments.
Give suggestions on how to crack the recession.
Explore economy travel routes.
Save power, water, fuel.
Get more educated professionally.
Be optimistic about the future.

But for businesses to weather the storm created by the current financial crisis, it is a different ball game. To stabilize the businesses, as David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter of Boston Consulting Group would have it, the companies must

(1) protect their financial fundamentals by monitoring and maximizing cash flow, managing customer credit risk, reducing working capital, and optimizing their financial structure and financing options;

(2) protecting their existing business operations by reducing costs, increasing organizational efficiency, aggressively managing the top line, rethinking their product portfolio and pricing, controlling or limiting investment plans, and divesting non-core businesses; and

(3) work to maximize their valuation relative to rivals by being proactive in their investor relations and favoring dividends over share buybacks.

Prathap G, Sharjah, U.A.E.

Wake up, India Inc

THE SECRETARY GENERAL,
THE INDIAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE,
INDIA.

Dear Sir,

If China is one notch up in industrial production, exports, and in the creation of a better GDP than India, it is because they do whatever they can to promote their products and services, domestically, and across the world. A case in point is the below mentioned e-mail from a Chinese supplier of industrial chemical products which we received. We get hundreds of emails from Chinese producers and manufactures of products ranging from paper clips to aircrafts.

We the Indians are a sluggish lot in whatever we do, and find satisfaction in petty achievements, and sleep. We need to wake up, earlier the better. We need to put our industrial production on top gear, and go for gold, and then only we can come anywhere near calling ourselves a "developed country" by 2020.

Click on the link below, read it, and see whether we can do something about keeping our businesses prepared for the bad economic climate we, the Indians, and the rest of the world, are currently in.

Collateral Damage

Have a nice day, and here I sign off.

Best regards,

PRATHAP G.
CONMIX LIMITED,
P O BOX 5936, SHARJAH, UAE - TEL. +971 6 5314155 - FAX. +9716 5314332
e-mail: conmix@conmix.com - prathap@conmix.com - web: www.conmix.com

Dear Sir,

I got your information from internet, I think there may be some opportunities we can corporate. We are one of the largest chemical manufactures in china, which specializes in manufacturing, supplying and selling basis chemical raw materials.

Our main products includes thebasis Inorganic and Organic Chemicals, Pigment and Dyestuffs, and so on., which are used in the Paint & Coating Industry, Rubber Industry, Textile and Leather industry, Water-treatment Industry, Feed Industry, Fertilizer Industry, etc. Such as Titanium Dioxide, Chrome Green, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, CMC, Formic Acid, Pentaerythritol, and so on.

I attached here the catalogue of our company. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested in any of our products.
Thanks and best regards!

Yours respectfully
Emily
HEBEI YONGHUI CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES IMPORT AND EXPORT CO., LTD.
NO.199, XINHUA ROAD, SHIJIAZHUANG, HEBEI, CHINA

Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage - Part 4: Prearing for a Tough Year Ahead: The Outlook, the Crisis in Perspective, and Lessons from the Early Movers.

In this fourth part of our Collateral Damage series, we consider the outlook for 2009(including the likely effect of the crisis on consumers around the world), revisit the history of the crisis in order to understand why the economic story has developed as it has, describe the very varied assumptions that some major companies are making for 2009, and detail how four major companies responded early to the crisis. We also include three appendixes. The first contains an analysis of the parallels between the current recession and the Great Depression; the second provides a portrait of the recession through a series of statistical graphics; and the third describes some of the seminal events in the crisis - The Boston Consulting Group. Read on