The big knock on Slumdog Millionaire --which I think is still supposed to be the official front-runner to win the Academy Award for Best Picture this weekend, but you might want to double-check with somebody who cares--is that, as a spangly, ostentatiously confected romance with a plot built on coincidences and luck, it's too lightweight an entertainment to deserve the great prize that has previously gone to such thoughtful works of art as Gladiator, Kramer vs. Kramer, and The Great Ziegfeld. But for a piece of fluff, particularly a piece of fluff in the same category as films about such weighty subjects as gay rights activists, lying crooked presidents, and hot Nazi bibliophiles, it sure has pissed off a lot of people. A month ago, a story in the Los Angeles Times laid out the case being made against it in the country where it was made and which it purports to depict: it's "yet another stereotypical foreign depiction of their nation, accentuating squalor, corruption and impoverished-if-resilient natives." It's "a poverty tour." It even added insult to injury by introducing to the world a brand-new ethnic slur for poor Indians, as if the world had been having trouble coming up with its own. (The term "slumdog" was the invention of screenwriter Simon Beaufoy.) Now, in just to time to mess with the film's Oscar hopes, come accusations that the film exploited its eight-year-old child stars by underpaying them.

The degree to which this charge has legs basically comes down to how much responsibility you have to young, poor kids to whom you've given an opportunity (and who you've used to spark up your movie) after it's time for the parade to move on.

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