India (Commonwealth Union)_The most anticipated Oscar award nominations have finally been announced. Unsurprisingly, RRR has been nominated for the 95th Academy Awards, one of the three nominations for Indian movies, for Best Original Song for Naatu Naatu, which also bagged the Golden Globe in the same category. Celebrating the victory, RRR’s official Twitter account declared, “We created history”.
To win the Oscar, Naatu Naatu will fight against four other nominated songs, including Applause from Tell It Like A Woman; Lady Gaga’s Hold My Hand from Top Gun: Maverick; Rihanna’s Lift Me Up from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; and This Is A Life from Everything Everywhere All At Once. A conspicuous exclusion is Taylor Swift’s Golden Globe-nominated song Carolina from Where The Crawdads Sing.
Apart from Naatu Naatu, two other documentaries from India were also nominated for Oscars. They are All That Breathes for the category of Best Documentary Feature Film and The Elephant Whisperers for the category of Best Documentary Short. The official Oscar submission from India, Chhello Show or Last Picture Show, was omitted in the finals from the Best International Feature Film category.
If Naatu Naatu composer MM Keeravaani wins an Oscar in addition to his Golden Globe, he will join a group of Indian Oscar winners that includes Bhanu Athaiya, who bagged Best Costume Design for Gandhi, and AR Rahman, Gulzar, and sound engineer Resul Pookutty, who won the award for their contributions in Slumdog Millionaire, a British film made in India.
The Oscar nominations were revealed by actors Riz Ahmed and Alison Williams. The 95th Academy Awards will take place in Los Angeles on March 12. Talk show anchor Jimmy Kimmel will serve as host for the third time. In addition to RRR and two other documentaries, the past movies that were nominated from India for Oscar’s Best International Feature Film are Mother India, Salaam Bombay, and Lagaan.