LOS ANGELES -- It's a slam dunk for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire to win as best picture on Oscar night. That's the word from William Friedkin, the veteran Hollywood filmmaker who cleaned up on Oscar night himself with The French Connection 37 years ago.

"I really feel that Slumdog Millionaire will win -- and that's okay," Friedkin tells Sun Media.

"They (his industry and the 5,810 voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) love the underdog. And that's an underdog film. Nobody wanted to make it, just as nobody wanted to make The French Connection. It was turned down by every studio for two years."

Friedkin expects Slumdog to do as well or better than his movie. The French Connection won five Oscars at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony, including best picture and Friedkin as best director.

But the 73-year-old Friedkin, who was nominated again two years later for directing The Exorcist, is uneasy with the notion that an Oscar goes to "the best" of anything.

So he confesses only to a passing interest in each year's Oscars. When I ask if he is "keyed up" about this Sunday, he replies with a laugh and says: "Keyed up would hardly be the phrase. I am vaguely aware of it."

Winning an Oscar is a strange notion for him.

"I never thought of it as winning anything. It is strictly a subjective judgment that people have that is, to a great extent, driven by the media. And who knows what the hell is the best film? I mean, Citizen Kane did not win the best film! I don't know if it is the best film ever made -- but it is to me."

As for this year's crop, "There are some wonderful films being nominated -- and not being nominated. I'll tell you the best film I have seen in many years was The Baader Meinhof Complex (the German film in the best foreign language film category), which is not released here yet. They don't have a distributor here and it is a great, great movie, really a top example of how it is done. Very powerful and very important. I don't see it winning (in its single category) because nobody's seen it, except the 10 guys on the committee who vote for the short list."

Friedkin produced the Oscar ceremony in 1977, the year that Rocky and Network were among the major players.

That year, he deliberately took the word "best" out of every announcement of the nominees and the winners. "At the end, I had Warren Beatty explain to the audience that that's what we did because we didn't really believe that there is such a thing as the best anything. It's what you like and what I like, which might be completely different.

"Gene Kelly told me afterwards: 'I think these changes are going to stick.' And, of course, they didn't!"

If -- or when -- Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire triumph on Sunday, Friedkin has some words of wisdom: Keep cool and don't let the Oscar glow warp your sense of self-worth.

"I was elated to win and very depressed afterwards," he says of his own experience.

"The most depressing day I ever spent was the day after. And I have no idea why. And it took a while to come out of that."

Not even therapy helped, although talking to friends did. Friedkin, who never expected The French Connection to even be nominated -- "I thought I was making a B-movie!" -- says one possible reason for his post-Oscar depression was suddenly thinking he had set a highwater mark he could never reach again.

Meanwhile, don't scan the Oscar crowd for a glimpse of Friedkin and his glamourous wife, former Hollywood executive Sherry Lansing, who was involved in several significant, Oscar-winning films.

Instead, the couple will be at Harvard University this weekend for a retrospective of his films. On Oscar Sunday, they head to New York to prepare for Monday's Blu-ray presentation of The French Connection at the Museum of Modern Art.