• Amid the praise for Slumdog Millionaire comes more of the baffling criticism that it's a bad film because it's not a highly accurate portrayal of the lives of poor people in contemporary India. The latest objector is Salman Rushdie, speaking to an audience in Atlanta. "The movie piles impossibility on impossibility," complains the author of Midnight's Children, which features a lead character imbued with telepathic superpowers as a result of being born at the precise moment of Indian independence in 1947. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the grumbly Rushdie doesn't think much of the academy's other favourites either. The chances of the Booker prizewinner being invited to open next year's ceremony with a high-kicking Hugh-Jackmanesque song-and-dance number seem to be remote.

• Congratulations to the airheaded Ryan Seacrest for his sensitive red-carpet interviews with young members of the cast of Slumdog Millionaire on the cable channel E!. Shocked to discover that some had names longer than "Ryan Seacrest", he first refused to introduce them properly, instead holding a scrap of paper up to the camera, "because we're short on time". Then he seemed baffled when one didn't reply to his question about working on the movie. "He doesn't speak English," another cast member interjected. "This man is an oxygen thief," notes one commenter on the Hollywood blog Defamer, "and as such should be vacuum-packed for all eternity."

• A less-than-brilliant Oscars for Nate Silver, who used his skills as a baseball statistics nerd to turn his politics blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, into the online hit of last year's election. Silver predicted the presidential outcome with eerie precision, and gamely crunched the numbers for Sunday's awards ceremony too, weighing such factors as release date, box office takings, genre, and which other awards a movie or actor has won this season. And so step forward Best Actor Mickey Rourke and Best Supporting Actress Taraji Henson, from Benjamin Button. Oh well.