Slumdog Millionaire this week joins a very exclusive club. It becomes only the 16th movie to both win an Academy Award for Best Picture and generate a top 10 soundtrack album. The Oscar, especially the coveted prize for Best Picture, is one of the most universally recognized marks of success in entertainment. So is the Billboard 200 album chart, especially the much-reprinted top 10. It's not easy to come out on top in either of these worlds. To triumph in both of them is so hard that it has happened just 16 times in the 64 years since Billboard introduced its album chart.

The list of films that have won the Oscar for Best Picture and spawned a top 10 soundtrack includes both "little movies" such as Rocky and Chariots Of Fire and big, screen-filling epics such as Titanic and Lawrence Of Arabia. It includes six musicals (most recently, Chicago) and one movie filled with iconic oldies (Forrest Gump). Four of the soundtracks (Titanic, Chariots Of Fire, Rocky and Going My Way) spun off #1

We will soon learn the identity of the 75^th winner of the Oscar for Best Original Song. It will either be from Slumdog Millionaire, which has two tunes in the running ("O Saya" and the joyous finale "Jai Ho"), or WALL-E, which has one ("Down To Earth," co-written by Peter Gabriel). If you haven't seen the movies, there's a good chance you haven't heard these songs. None of them has appeared on Billboard's Hot 100. But that's the way things have been going in this category in recent years. Six of the last eight Best Song winners failed to crack the chart. The only Best Song winners in the 2000s that have charted are Eminem's monster hit "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile and "Falling Slowly" from Once, which reached a middling #61 last year. It wasn't always like this. Thirty-one of the first 54 Best Song winners reached #1. But in the past 20 years, only three winners have topped the chart: "A Whole New World (Aladdin's Theme)," "My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme From Titanic)" and "Lose

Bruce Springsteen's Working On A Dream enters The Billboard 200 at #1. It's the New Jersey native's ninth #1 album, which puts him in the all-time top five on the list of artists with most #1 albums. The Beatles lead the pack with 19 chart-toppers, followed by Elvis Presley and Jay-Z, with 10 each, and the Rolling Stones and Springsteen, with nine each. Except for Jay-Z, Springsteen is the most recent arrival on this list. He released his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., in January 1973.

By landing his ninth #1 album, Springsteen surges ahead of Barbra Streisand and Garth Brooks, who have each amassed eight #1 albums.

Working On A Dream, which opened with sales of 224,000 copies, is Springsteen's fifth album to debut at #1. Three of the other four started with fatter first-week totals. The Rising bowed with sales of 525,000; Magic with 335,000; and Greatest Hits with 251,000. Of these five albums, only Devils & Dust had a slower first week. It started with 222,000.

Next Tuesday (Feb. 3) marks the 50th anniversary of the most famous plane crash in rock'n'roll history, an accident that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Don McLean famously referred to it as "the day the music died" in his 1971 epic, "American Pie." Holly, who was just 22 when he died, holds a unique distinction: He had the shortest lifespan of any artist who has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

A surprising number of artists whose lives were cut tragically short have been voted Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Recording Academy. Twenty-two solo artists who died before their 50th birthdays have received the honor. This is remarkable because it's obviously harder to leave a significant legacy if you're denied the luxury of time. But few would argue that these artists did just that.

Drug and/or alcohol abuse played a role in many of these deaths. Given how much performers travel, it's not surprising that four of the 22 artists (Holly, Otis