Freida Pinto (born October 18, 1984) is an Indian actress and professional model, best known for her performance as Latika in her debut film Slumdog Millionaire, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2009. Pinto won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Freida Pinto was born in Mumbai to Sylvia Pinto, now a principal of St. John’s Universal High School (Goregaon), and Frederick Pinto, a senior branch manager at the Bank of Baroda. Freida Pinto’s father is from Neerude and mother from Derebail, both towns in Mangalore. Her elder sister Sharon Pinto is an associate producer on the NDTV news channel.
It may come up short of the $31 million Miley Cyrus’ 3-D movie bowed to, but Jonas Brothers: 3-D Concert Experience did come out on top of Friday’s estimates with a $4.8 million opening, on tap for a $20 million weekend. That was just enough to unseat last weekend’s top dog, Madea Goes to Jail ($4.6 million), which will likely top $60 million after just its second week. Friday’s third-place spot went to Slumdog Millionaire ($3.2 million), on pace for a nice post-Oscar bump thanks in part to Fox Searchlight adding 700 runs this frame. And fourth-place Taken ($2.85 million) is set to break $100 million after just four weeks in release.
WALL-E is a 2008 computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. The film was directed by Andrew Stanton. It follows the story of a robot named WALL-E who is designed to clean up a waste covered Earth far in the future. He eventually falls in love with another robot named EVE, and follows her into outer space on an adventure.
As prestige pics and statuettes hogged the weekend limelight, Tyler Perry’s urban comedy “Madea Goes to Jail” dominated the domestic boxoffice with an estimated $41.1 million opening that represented Lionsgate’s biggest ever.
A “Friday the 13th” remake — which Warner Bros. bowed so well a week earlier — absorbed an enormous 81% drop from its first Friday-Sunday grosses to register $7.8 million in sixth place over the latest session. Paramount is handling international distribution on the New Line-produced horror pic, which has rung up $55 million over its first 10 days.
Sony Screen Gems’ youth comedy “Fired Up” fetched just $6 million in ninth place in the session’s only other wide opening. Yet aside from such occasional misfires with individual releases, it seems the industry boxoffice can do no wrong right now.
“Slumdog Millionaire” — a love story that combines artistic ambition with broad commercial appeal — won a leading eight Oscars on Sunday night, including the best picture trophy.
While the film’s triumphs at the 81st annual Academy Awards marked an amazing outcome for a movie filled with subtitles, scenes of torture and a Bollywood dance sequence, the wins also cemented the reputation of distributor Fox Searchlight, which has become Hollywood’s top advocate of the kind of daring works that movie studios have all but abandoned.
Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle, with co-director (India) Loveleen Tandan, and written by Simon Beaufoy. It is an adaptation of the Boeke Prize winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize nominated novel Q and A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup.
Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a young uneducated man from the Dharavi slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati, mentioned in the Hindi version) and exceeds people’s expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.
After screenings at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire initially had a limited North American release on 12 November 2008 to critical acclaim and awards success, and later had a nationwide release in the United States on 26 December 2008 and in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2009. It premiered in Mumbai on 22 January 2009.
Slumdog Millionaire won five of the six awards it was nominated for at the Critics’ Choice Awards and all four of the awards it was nominated for at the Golden Globes, including Best Drama Film. It has also been nominated for eleven BAFTA Awards and ten Academy Awards.
