Moonlight and sunshine

Goof-ups, several firsts and Trump jokes, Oscars has to have a bit of entertainment and drama.  Predictably, politics had cast its shadow much before the 89th Academy Awards ceremony actually began. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman won the foreign language film Oscar, boycotted the function as a mark of protest against Trump’s travel ban. His victory message explaining his absence reinforces that art and artistes cannot be divorced from political reality. The show’s host, Jimmy Kimmel, too did not shy away from taking sardonic digs at the US President.

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However, beyond the political overtones and chaos that followed after the wrong film was named as the best picture, the mother of all awards still managed to salute the best. The top favourite La La Land, which was nominated for record-tying 14 categories, bagged six trophies. However, the Best Film award went to the more insightful Moonlight. As the Oscarssowhite debate has been raging for quite a while now, the Moonlight win is being hailed as a “powerful affirmation of gay black men”. Mahershala Ali winning the Academy Award for the best supporting actor for his portrayal of a drug dealer in Moonlight was bad news for the Indian-origin actor Dev Patel, also in the reckoning for the same award. Yet as Ali became the first Ahmadiya Muslim to pick up the golden statuette for acting, Oscar baiters and haters can rest easy. In these divisive times the world over, the academy awards also saw Syrian refugee Hala Kamil walk the red-carpet in hijab. A moment of sensitive symbolism. 

We in India, however, have little reason to rejoice. As it is, India’s Oscar tally is a meager six, four out of which have come its way via British drama Slumdog Millionaire. Whereas a country as small as Iran continues to wow the Oscar jury time and again, Indian films fail to make the cut in the foreign language category. Our creative film community needs to look into reasons why Oscar glory remains out of its grasp, considering the positive buzz many Indian films generate at international film festivals.