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Academy Award Winners 2008
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the winners of the 81st Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2008.
In the Best Original Score category, Indian composer A. R. Rahman won the Academy Award for his score for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. In his acceptance speech Rahman said:
Before coming, I was excited and terrified. The last time I felt like that was during my marriage. There’s a dialogue from a Hindi film, called “Mere paas ma hai,” which means, “I have nothing but I have a mother.” So mother’s here, her blessings are there with me. I am grateful for her to have come all the way. And I want to thank the Academy for being so kind, all the jury members. I want to thank Sam Schwartz, I/D PR, all the crew of “Slumdog,” Mr. Gulzar, Raqueeb Alam, Blaaze, my musicians in Chennai and Mumbai. And I want to tell something in Tamil, which says, which I normally say after every award, which is: Ella puhazhum iraivanukke. “God is great.” Thank you.
The other nominees for Best Original Score were Alexandre Desplat for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, James Newton Howard for Defiance, Danny Elfman for Milk, and Thomas Newman for WALL-E.
In the Best Original Song category, A. R. Rahman and Gulzar won the Academy Award for “Jai Ho,” also from Slumdog Millionaire.
The other nominees for Best Original Song were Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman for “Down to Earth” from WALL-E; and A. R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam for “O Saya” from Slumdog Millionaire.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE – A. R. Rahman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Bollywood music has never really crossed over into the film music mainstream, despite being an enormous industry on the Indian sub-continent; the closest Bollywood has to a composer superstar is A.R. Rahman, so it perhaps stands to reason that he should really be the first one to make any kind of impact on the Hollywood mainstream. Rahman has worked in the Indian film industry since the early 1990s, and has since gone on to score over 100 films, some of which – Taal from 1999, Lagaan from 2001, Rang De Basanti from 2006, and Jodhaa Akbar from earlier this year – have enjoyed a modicum of international success. He has even dabbled in the Hollywood world before, working with Mychael Danna on Water in 2006 and with Craig Armstrong on Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007. In his homeland, however, Rahman is revered: he has personally sold 100 million records of his film scores and soundtracks worldwide, and sold over 200 million solo albums, officially making him one of the world’s all-time top selling recording artists. No wonder he is often called the “John Williams of Bollywood” and the “Mozart of Madras”. It’s just surprising that it has taken this long for the West to recognize him. Read more…
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