Slumdog leads British charge I Exclusive Danny Boyle interview I Chief film critic's verdict I As it happened: Chris Ayres in LA I Full list of Oscar winners I Sixth time lucky for Kate I Best speeches I 20 best and worst dresses I Complete Oscars coverage

Teeming with filthy, giggling, half-naked children, rubbish-munching goats and mangy stray dogs and scattered with mounds of burning refuse, Garib Nagar may not boast the glamour quotient of the average Oscar party. But today, hundreds of residents of this Mumbai slum crowded around the neighbourhood's few television sets to follow the Academy Awards with bated breath.

The shanty town is where Danny Boyle, the British director, discovered Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali Qureshi, 9, the actors who play the youngest incarnations of the lead characters of Slumdog Millionaire. Among the children's neighbours, each of the eight Oscars that Slumdog won were met with whoops of joy and Bollywood-style dancing more raucous than anything witnessed among the glitterati assembled at the Kodak Theatre, some 9,000 miles away in Hollywood.

"We are so proud," a smiling Rafiq Asghar Ali Quereshi, Rubina's father, told The Times as he stood astride the oozing black open sewer that runs past the tiny family home. "My family and our neighbours watched every moment of the ceremony, from 3.30am. Our daughter has made all of India proud."

Rubina, who was flown to LA for the ceremony, had been awed by the spectacle of Hollywood in full party mode, but loved the new frock she was given by "Danny Uncle" to attend the show, Mr Quereshi said. She and Azharuddin will return to their slum in a couple of days, after a visit to Disney World.

Inside their tiny, bubblegum pink-painted shack, the Quereshis fed each other sticky Indian sweets to toast Slumdog's success. Outside, firecrackers exploded and music was played at a deafening volume as packs of journalists from around the world descended on to the scene.

Amid the carnival atmosphere, some of the locals allowed themselves to hope that Slumdog's success would somehow lift the fortunes of the area. Abdul Sheikh, a neighbour of Azharuddin's family, said: "We prayed to the Almighty that the movie would do well at the Oscars. Now we hope it will brighten the future of these children."

But there are also fears that the child actors will suffer when their moment of fame passes. Boyle has admitted that he almost didn't cast slum kids after asking himself "would it distort their lives too much".

Today, their playmates were afraid that the child actors might forget their roots. "She has achieved a lot and she has gone to the Oscars," said Muskaan, 8, of her friend Rubina. "I don't think she will play with me when she comes back."

There were also suggestions of resentment and cynicism. "Rubina's not an actress; she's not a messiah; she's a kid who was lucky to be chosen," one man said. "She may have gone to America, but she's coming back to the same slum."

Azharuddin and his mother have fallen out over how the money he earned from the film was spent, relatives said, and the family is now chronically short of cash.

His real-life story underscores the everyday hardships endured in India's slums – a world that Slumdog's makers have been accused of exploiting. His father usually earns about £1 a day selling scrap wood, but has been in hospitali with tuberculosis. After the family's hut was bulldozed without notice, they now live under a scrap of tarpaulin that stands no chance of keeping out the monsoon rains when they arrive in June.

"He's supposed to be the hero in the movie, but look how he's living," Azharuddin's mother, Shameem Ismail, said last week.

Mr Quereshi said that Mr Boyle — who made Slumdog Millionaire for only $15 million and has since seen the film take more than ten times that sum at the box office — recently promised to buy his family a better home after the Oscars were over. The money his daughter earned for her part in the film had seemed a large sum before Slumdog's release, he added. "But having seen its success, now I'm not sure."

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