Another Best Picture nominee

Slumdog Millionaire is both horrifying and uplifting, structurally simple yet insinuatingly complex. I don't know anything about director Danny Boyle, but this picture seems like Baz Luhrmann channelling Dickens and Bunuel to stage an epic saga depicting the most base human corruption and the existential capacity to prevail against it.

If you can handle ruthless massacres, graphic torture, dismemberment and child abuse, you will be rewarded with some wild humor, versatile entertainment and a positive message of love and survival. I don't remember any passages of moralizing or philosophizing but the action of the film opens up many issues and questions that are both timeless and timely and cry out for solutions that are both personal and political.

As a member of the WGA, Slumdog Millionaire will surely get my vote in its category, whatever it may happen to be.