It seems a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight. Well, okay. I haven’t even bothered to see all of the competition, but Boyle’s movie was certainly the liveliest, most consistently entertaining of the nominated films I have seen. Not as moving, complex, and real as Milk, no, but …it is fun here and there. It does have that going for it. And yet I hope it doesn’t win much of anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I like overheated melodrama. I love dancing on train platforms. I am even fond of completely outlandish story structures like the Q&A one at the heart of this movie. I like me my crazy storylines in service of a good time. But there is so much that is deeply wrong with Slumdog Millionaire that I can’t let go and enjoy the frippery of the story. That it has been embraced so feverishly by so many westerners I find deeply suspect, because no way no how not in a million years would this story fly with US audiences if it had been set in, say, New York.

But others have said this more sharply. Here’s a long quote from a blog review a friend linked to:

…the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India. . . .

Let’s say I made a movie about the US where an African-American boy born in the hood, has his mother sell him to a pedophile pop icon, after which he gets molested by a priest from his church, following which he gets tied up to the back of a truck and dragged on the road by KKK clansmen. Then he is arrested and sodomized by a policeman with a rod, after which he is attacked by a gang of illegal immigrants, and then uses these life experiences to win “Beauty and Geek”.

Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the “American experience” and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn’t be on 94% on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favorite.

But I can forgive Boyle and his screenwriter for the ridiculous structure. Because why not? There is a larger, more offensive storytelling sin to focus on.

The big one? Boyle’s cynical exploitation of other people’s pain as “local color.” That is to say, going for the easy emotional push-button of observed pain as a shortcut to connecting viewers to the main character. If a story is actually concerned with a character overcoming real suffering, then by all means, the viewer needs to see it and understand it. (Any number of films come to mind, but think of, say, Christy Brown in My Left Foot.) But is Slumdog Millionaire that kind of story? No, not at all. It’s a shameless melodrama about, . . . whatever—true love against all odds, featuring gangsters and gunplay and the usual cheapjack stew of genre elements. That is, it’s storytelling as frivolous entertainment, which I typically love.

Except the horrors depicted in the movie are still very real for millions of people. And so the whole movie feels morally lopsided as a result. It’s too inconsequential to do justice to the uglinesses evoked. Raiders of the Lost Ark, one notes, does feature Nazis as cartoon villains, but no mention of the incomprehensible crimes they committed. Kasdan and Spielberg knew—as Boyle does not—that too much reality will swamp a fun, fluffy tale. Once that story mentions the Holocaust, we could give a damn about Indiana Jones and his bullwhip.

Because storytelling can’t have it both ways: You don’t get to pull the curtain aside to reveal genuine pain and suffering, then drop it and milk the audience’s reaction for your diverting sideshow. That’s crass, that’s cynical, and Boyle shouldn’t be rewarded for it.