The nominations for the 76th Academy Awards have thrown up three talking points. Contrary to what we had believed, India is not quite out of the Oscars race. A powerful work, To Kill A Tiger, which focusses on the harrowing Jharkhand gang rape, has emerged as a strong candidate in the Best Feature Documentary category.
To Kill A Tiger has been helmed by Toronto based Nisha Pahuja, who follows the distressing events around the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in Jharkhand. We watch how her parents had to run around to get justice for their little girl.
The official synopsis reads, “To Kill a Tiger charts the emotional journey of an ordinary man facing extraordinary circumstances. A father whose love for his daughter forces a social reckoning that will reverberate for years to come.”
The second talking point: Lily Gladstone, who essayed a Osage woman and historical figure, Mollie Burkhart, in Martin Scorsese-helmed epic masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. This is the first ever time a Native American woman gets this honour.
Burkhart essayed the wife of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo de Caprio) – who on the command of his uncle, William King Hale (Robert de Niro), poisons his wife to get her headrights.
There have been other indigenous women who had got the Oscar nod. For the 2019 Academy Awards, Mexico’s Yalitza Aparicio was one. She acted in Alfonso Cuaron’s 2018 Roma as a housekeeper. There were more. Merle Oberon was nominated a long time ago in 1933 for The Dark Angel. She belonged to the Maori clan from New Zealand. Keisha Castle-hughes came in 2003 with Whale Rider. She is a Kiwi.
Killers of the Flower Moon follows the inhabitants of the Osage Nation who were ruthlessly killed by whites. They were after the tribes wealth who owned and controlled oil fields. This gruesome tragedy took place in Oklahoma.
Killers of the Flower Moon secured several other nominations – including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for De Niro among others. It also got the nod for the Best Original Song (A Song for My People).
Finally, the third significant aspect of this year’s nominations involves Oppenheimer. It has become one of the most dominant winners since Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which garnered eight statuettes. It is quite possible that Oppenheimer may race past Slumdog Millionaire. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a historical drama about the father of the Atomic Bomb, is leading with 13 nominations. It is the 11th work to reach this tally.
Six of the previous 10 films which scored best picture wins, included classics like “Gone with the Wind” (1939), “Forrest Gump” (1994), and “The Shape of Water” (2017). The four classics that lost were “Mary Poppins” (1964), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008). These were not heavily favoured to triumph. But that is probably not the fate of Oppenheimer, particularly after its victories at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards.
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