We characterize Birkhoff-James orthogonality of bounded multilinear maps in its full generality, probably for the first time. In the special case, the said result reduces to the Birkhoff-James orthogonality of bounded linear operators on an infinite-dimensional complex normed linear space, a new addition to the existing literature. The said characterization, whenever restricted to the setting of Hilbert space, leads to a multilinear generalization of the well-known Bhatia-Šemrl Theorem in both finite and infinite-dimensional cases. As a natural outcome of our investigations, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions of smoothness for bounded multilinear maps. Contrary to most of the previous results that address the smoothness of linear operators in the context of real normed linear spaces, we study the smoothness of multilinear maps in the realm of complex normed linear spaces. Our results extend and improve some recent results related to the smoothness of linear operators.