WASHINGTON: The US President, Barack Obama, wants to watch "Slumdog Millionaire", the White House has said.


"Slumdog Millionaire", the exhilarating rags-to-riches fairy tale set in Mumbai, swept the Oscars with eight awards including the best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay; with A R Rahman becoming the only Indian to bag two Oscars for the best score and original song.

"I don't know if he has seen 'Slumdog Millionaire'. I know he wants to," White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told reporters during the course of his daily press briefing.

Gibbs said Obama has watched several movies recently. "I think that a lot of the movies that he has seen recently are movies that might also entertain a seven-and-a-10-year-old girl. Not sure that "Slumdog Millionaire" would be on that list," Gibbs said.

Directed and scripted though it is by Britons, with rousing songs, an underdog hero and a love-conquers-all theme, the film has all the terrifying cliches of a Bollywood film, but skilled cinematography and a dazzling directorial energy have infused it with a stabbing piquancy.

A stripling from a Mumbai slum stuns the world when he answers question after question on a television quiz show and is a mere step away from seizing the jackpot when he is arrested on the suspicion that he has rigged his performance.

What follows is a long explanation for his amazing general knowledge that takes the viewer on a brutal roller-coaster ride of a life furrowed with crime, riots and beggary, but backlit with the hope that one can and must escape the coils of poverty.

The film has cleaved its audience into those who dismiss it as nothing more than a good entertainer and others who can’t get enough of its feel-good spirit, that is broadly reflective of the emerging India mindset. Ultimately, it is a modern fairy-tale set not in a scented forest, but in a stinking urban wasteland. Slumdog Millionaire is where Hollywood and Bollywood join forces in a joyous coupling to celebrate the glory of the human spirit.