BEVERLY HILLS (USA), Feb 11: The musical “Chicago”, the drama “The Hours” and fantasy spectacular “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” were named among the five Oscar nominees for best picture on Tuesday.
Also competing in the top Oscars category were Martin Scorsese’s period epic, “Gangs of New York”, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Roman Polanski’s Holocaust movie, “The Pianist”, starring Adrien Brody.
The razzle-dazzle musical “Chicago” was the unmitigated star of the 75th-annual Oscar nomination unveiled in Beverly Hills, leading the pack with 13 nominations, joining a rare club of just seven other films to earn so many.
The film stars Renee Zellweger, who won a best actress nod, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who walked away with a best supporting actress nomination, and Richard Gere.
The wrenching drama “The Hours” stars Nicole Kidman wearing a prosthetic nose to play British playwright Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore as a 1950s housewife and Meryl Streep as a 21st-century socialite.
The three women, linked in time by Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” all experience desperate moments as they search for meaning in their lives.
The nomination for Peter Jackson’s second installment of his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of movies comes after the first movie won the same nod last year.
“Devdas” misses nomination: Bollywood’s costliest-ever movie “Devdas” (Pining Lover) on Tuesday missed out on an Oscar nomination in the prestigious foreign films category, but its film makers tried to put up a brave face.
“We have lost in the Oscar race ... But we tried our best,” the producer of the film Bharat Shah said.
“It is our bad luck. Bagging the nomination and the award depends on the jury, and I think we did not get the jury’s verdict in our favour,” said Shah.
However, the movie has broken ground in Britain by becoming the first Indian movie to be nominated for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards last month.
The BAFTA nomination is the second major international honour the movie has received after a special out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
“Devdas”, a tragic film-musical, made at a cost of 500 million rupees, was one of the few money-spinners in India last year.
The lavish production, a remake of a romantic tragedy well-known in India, tells the tale of Devdas and Paro, childhood sweethearts who are separated and destined to pine for each other.
The story unravels against a backdrop of impossibly rich sets, saturated colours and dance that is typical of such Bollywood movies.
Shah said his company and the film’s director Sanjay Leela Bhansali had left no stone unturned to market the movie, especially after last year’s Oscar nomination for Bollywood’s “Lagaan”.
“We showed the movie to the jury as well as to many people in the US as it was released there. But I think the jury’s view was divided,” Shah said.
He said he was confidant that the movie will get the BAFTA awards as Britain understood Indian culture better.
“The product was really good and made with lots of love by the director. I do not know what went wrong,” said well-known star Jackie Shroff in an interview with Aaj Tak news channel.
“Maybe the other foreign films who made it to the category were better than Devdas.”
Shroff was also one of the stars in “Devdas”.
Film critics were ,however, sceptical about “Devdas” chances when the Indian government submitted it as the official entry for this year’s Oscar.
“Lagaan, which got an Oscar nomination last year and Devdas are in completely different leagues altogether,” Indu Mirani, publisher of weekly film trade magazine Box Office had said earlier.
The 5.3 million-dollar “Lagaan” told the story of Indian villagers in the 1890s who to avoid paying a crippling land tax to the British faced off with their colonial rulers at cricket.
“While ‘Lagaan’ is a classic representation of human triumph over adversity, the stuff Hollywood loves, ‘Devdas’ is about tragedy, lost love and alcoholism,” Mirani said.
“Its the story of a loser and had no chance at the Oscars. I do not think it should have been selected at all.”
Critics also said that “Devdas” was too India-centred for the Oscars.
The film is set a century ago and focuses on a boy from the highest caste, the Brahmins, who drinks himself into oblivion pining for his lost love. —AFP