Button or Slumdog at the Oscars - tough choice

I am split in my loyalties ahead of the Academy Awards. While I want 'Slumdog Millionaire' to do well for obvious reasons, I am equally happy if 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' walks away with an armful of statuettes, as this was a major project for our sister company Lowry Digital.

Film & Video has a very fact filled Q&A with Alan Silvers that is pre-faced thus:

Lowry Digital is well-known among videophiles as a company that enables cutting-edge digital restorations of significant films for DVD and Blu-ray — modulating grain, repairing damage, and returning important titles to show-print status. But as more and more production moves into the digital realm, Lowry is flexing new muscles. Lowry has worked on 3D features like Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, where fine image-matching between the left-eye and right-eye pictures becomes crucial to a comfortable viewing experience — Lowry Digital Director of Business Development Alan Silvers notes that founder John Lowry is nurturing a venture, Trioscopics, dedicated to improving digital 3D. But Silvers believes what's known as "the Lowry process" has applications in the traditional feature-film workflow, especially as directors work to incorporate multiple shooting formats into a single, nuanced vision. One of Lowry's most recent projects, director David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has just been nominated for 13 Academy Awards — including, crucially, a nod for Claudio Miranda's work as cinematographer.

So while I liked Anthony Dod Mantle's camerawork in Slumdog, my vote would go to Claudio Miranda - not least because we've been getting complaints from members of the audience here in our cinemas in Mumbai, objecting to the digital cinema projection because the image is (they say) dark, grainy and pixilated, not realizing that it is not the projection - which was checked by STAR-Fox staff ahead of the films gala screening, that we arranged in digital - but the artistic intention of the filmmakers.

And just so you don't think either I or Lowry have anything against our good friends at 20th Century Fox - Lowry just completed some stellar work on The Robe as well.