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. It's been reported that Rubina Ali, who plays the hero's love interest as a child, and Azharuddin Ismail, who plays the hero's brother, were paid the equivalent of $730 and $2,475, respectively, for their performances. The filmmakers say they were paid more than that, and have said that they were paid many times the average adult salary for the area, though it's possible that they could have been paid a hell of a lot more than most people make in the region and still not have been paid not much more than the reported figures. Rubina Ali's father, "Rafiq Ali Kureshi, a carpenter who said he was a set builder for the film, broke his leg during filming and has been unemployed since." As for Ismail, "His family's illegal shanty was recently demolished, and his father is suffering from tuberculosis. They live under a tarp. Much of his salary from the film has been spent on his father's treatment and feeding his family, he said." At the same time, Slumdog director Danny Boyle has seen to it that both children have been admitted to school for the first time in their lives and has also set up a trust fund that they will receive after completing their educations.

The situation may recall that of 2007's The Kite Runner, in which the moviemakers were first accused of underpaying their Afghani child actors and then charged with having endangered their lives by putting them in a movie that, some prophesied, would set off protests that might make the cast members targets. (In the end, Paramount paid to relocate four of the children and their relatives to the United Arab Emirates, and according to some reports has continued to help pay for their upkeep.) There may be no easy way to know just how thoroughly you're exploiting or not exploiting nonprofessional actors, especially children, in situations like this; if your movie is a box office smash, as Slumdog turned out to be (and as The Kite Runner did not) then it may seem obvious to those on the outside that you have a great responsibility to see to it that those who helped you are richly rewarded, but when you're trying to get a movie made under difficult circumstances--and Slumdog was not an easy shoot--it may not seem especially obvious that you ought to reimburse an unknown nonprofessional child as if he were Tom Cruise, or even that paying him more money than his father will receive in his life is inadequate. And even if there were some perfect figure that everyone could agree on as payment, the fact remains that, especially for children who have known Third World poverty, the experience of being in a big English-language movie is bound to set up expectations about how it's going to automatically change one's life. (One of the Kite Runner boys said that he wanted to be relocated to America because the kidnapping industry in his country made it too dangerous to be rich and famous.) About the only way to make sure that even the appearance of exploitation in such cases never happens again would probably be to never give another kid the chance to be in a movie. The kids would love that.