RRR bags 2 trophies at Critics’ Choice Awards: Best Foreign Language Film & Best Original Song

• After bagging a Golden Globe, SS Rajamouli’s RRR won two awards at the Critics' Choice Award held in Los Angeles — Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Song.
  
• Till date, RRR has won over 30 international awards.
  
• RRR isn’t India’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
  

Director SS Rajamouli’s RRR has kept up with its award-winning streak as it won two awards at the 28th Critics' Choice Awards held in Los Angeles on Monday. It bagged awards in two categories – Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Song after being nominated for five categories.

RRR beat the likes of All Quiet on the Western Front (German), Argentina, 1985 (Argentinian), Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Mexican), Close (French) and Decision to Leave (Korean) — to win the Critics' Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Last week, the movie won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song for Naatu Naatu. RRR was also nominated for the Best Foreign Film category at the Golden Globes but lost the award to the Argentinian drama, Argentina, 1985.

The movie’s dance number Naatu Naatu also bagged a Critics' Choice Award. The song’s composer M M Keeravani said that the song resonated with the audience because of its “uniqueness and freshness that caught the attention, globally.”

Naatu Naatu has become an international sensation with multiple videos surfacing online of crowds, across the globe, dancing to the track in movie halls. The song has been translated into Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tamil.

You win some, lose some

RRR was nominated across five categories - Best Director, Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, in addition to the ones it already won.

Rajamouli lost the Best Director Critics' Choice Awards to director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (for Everything Everywhere All at Once). Other than Rajamouli, the category had 10 nominees, including the likes of James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Todd Field and Baz Luhrmann.

RRR was also nominated for Best Picture, along with Everything Everywhere All At Once, Avatar: The Way of Water, Babylon, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Tár and Top Gun: Maverick. Ultimately, the absurdist black comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All At Once won the award.

RRR, one of the most expensive Indian films ever made, also lost the award for Best Visual Effects to director James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. Avatar 2 also competed against Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Batman, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Top Gun: Maverick.

Other notable winners at the Critics’ Choice Awards include Cate Blanchett (Best Actress for Tár), Brendan Fraser (Best Actor for The Whale), and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for Best Animated Feature. Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, of Joker fame, also won the award for the Best Score for Tár.

From Tollywood to Hollywood

In the meanwhile, Rajamouli has been meeting top Hollywood directors – some of whom he was nominated against — and sharing social media updates about them. "The great James Cameron watched 'RRR'. He liked it so much that he recommended to his wife Suzy and watched it again with her. Sir, I still cannot believe you spent a whole 10 minutes with us analyzing our movie,” he tweeted.



He had another fanboy moment as he met Steven Spielberg at an A-list star-studded celebration thrown by Universal at West Hollywood's famous Sunset Tower Hotel. "I just met GOD!!!" Rajamouli had captioned the image of meeting Speilberg.

In spite of its gaining popularity, RRR isn’t India’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 95th Academy Awards. India’s official entry is director Pan Nalin’s Gujarati-language drama Chhello Show (The Last Film Show) which also made it to the Oscar shortlist. RRR has won over 30 international awards to date.

(with inputs from IANS)