Final answer: awards glory

November 13, 2008 Yet if the Danny Boyle film emerges from the pack to pick up a best picture nomination -- and like many others, I think it will -- it would be one of the least likely best picture nominees in history. By conventional expectations, the director's India-set movie about a slum kid who fights his way out of poverty and on to a "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"-type show shouldn't work onscreen. Any other project to attempt such a melange of genres -- a Dickensian coming-of-age story, a romantic fairy tale, a "Kite Runner"-ish saga of class and religious tensions, a pop-culture sendup, a globalist screed, a game show drama, a gangster epic and a Bollywood fable -- normally would end up either unmade or a big mess.

Subscribe to the Hollywood Reporter and see the entertainment industry from its best angle: the inside looking out. Complete access to real-time news and exclusive analysis that goes behind the scenes from film to television, home video to digital media.

   Subscribe now.