The 95th Academy Awards are here and this time, India is competing for three trophies at the most popular awards around the world. RRR’s song Naatu Naatu is in competition for the Best Original Song, All That Breathes is competing for the Best Documentary Feature award and The Elephant Whisperers is competing in the Best Documentary Short Subject category.
The ceremony will see presenters like Deepika Padukone, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Michael B Jordan, Jonathan Majors, Riz Ahmed, among others.
Michelle Yeoh starrer Everything Everywhere All at Once is leading the nominations at this year’s ceremony. The film is competing in 11 categories including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor among others. All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin have both received nominations in 9 categories.
After a big Oscar campaign, it was expected that SS Rajamouli’s RRR might find a spot for itself in the the Best Picture or the Best Director category, but the film did not make it to the final nominations.
Ram Charan and NTR Jr along with the director was seen gracing the red carpet. "I have the tiger, the national animal of India here. It’s not going to be an actor from RRR who’s walking the carpet, but India that walks the carpet.” says Jr NTR on the Oscars 2023 red carpet.
The Best Picture nominations this year include – All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking.
Five directors are competing for the Best Director title – Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans), Todd Field (Tár) and Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness).
Late-night stalwart Jimmy Kimmel has returned to host the Oscars for the third time. “The mission: The Oscars. The host: me? Yes, me,” he tweeted when the announcement was delivered in the form of a “Top Gun” spoof, featuring Jon Hamm and Charles Parnell. He hosted the ceremony in 2018 and 2017, the year the event was overshadowed by a last-minute mixup that saw “La La Land” recognized for best picture when the award was meant to go to Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight.”
Also, looking at the previous mistakes- for instance “Moonlight” envelope mixup to “the slap,” the Academy for the first time has put a designated crisis management team in place to respond to any unwelcome surprises or erupting controversies.
Academy CEO Bill Kramer, who got the job last summer, has described an Oscars war room designed to mobilize spokespeople or issue statements on the fly: “Because of last year, we’ve opened our minds to the many things that can happen at the Oscars,” he said in a recent interview with Time. “We’ve run many scenarios. So it is our hope that we will be prepared for anything that we may not anticipate right now but that we’re planning for just in case it does happen.”
