‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ is leading the race with 11 nominations.
SS Rajamouli’s RRR scored a single nomination at the 2023 Oscars in the Music (Original Song) category for Naatu Naatu, while Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes has been shortlisted in the Best Documentary Feature Film category. All That Breathes is only the second Indian title to be nominated in the long documentary format after Writing With Fire in 2021.
India will also be represented in the Documentary Short Film category by Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers (produced by Guneet Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment).
Nominations for the 95th edition of the Oscars, officially known as the Academy Awards, were announced on Tuesday by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams. The Oscars will be held on March 12, with Jimmy Kimmel as the host.
Shaunak Sen’s critically feted documentary sets the experiences of a pair of bird rescuing brothers in Delhi against rising pollution and an increasingly toxic political climate for minority communities. In a previous interview with Scroll.in, Sen had said:
“I was interested in the visual texture of growing up in Delhi, a dystopian place where everything is grey. Among Delhi’s archetypal images is these dots in the sky, these black kites. The general sense is that the air is noxious, that the engines of spaceship Earth have gone awry. I was also deeply interested in the human-non human relationship, and particularly in birds. The initial thing was to try and make a film where audiences would step out of theatres and immediately look up at the sky.”
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In ‘All That Breathes’, brothers who rescue birds and a struggle for human survival
Hopes were high for RRR, which has won praise from Hollywood heavyweights and charmed audiences the world over with its rumbustious tale of two revolutionaries taking on British colonisers. Despite being passed over for Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show as India’s official entry for International Feature Film, Rajamouli and his team mounted an extensive campaign in America over the past few months to compete on their own. Yet, Rajamouli’s Telugu-language period epic failed to make it to the Best Picture and Best Director categories.
While AR Rahman’s songs for Slumdog Millionaire have been previously nominated and have won at the Oscars, Naatu Naatu, composed by MM Keeravani, is the first tune from an entirely homegrown production (DVV Entertainments) to be nominated in the category.
