India's 2010 Oscar Entry Was Peepli Live, Not Action Replayy

A correction is due on this story. An earlier version reported that Akshay Kumar's Diwali release Action Replayy had received India's official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. That was wrong. India's official entry for the 83rd Academy Awards, announced by the Film Federation of India on September 24, 2010, was Peepli Live — Anusha Rizvi's satirical comedy about farmer suicides and the media circus around them, produced by Aamir Khan.

Peepli Live was selected from a shortlist of 27 films that included Raajneeti and Udaan. Aamir said the selection was "a special honour" and thanked the FFI; he also made clear, as he has many times, that he does not make films for awards — he makes them for audiences. The film did not advance to the Academy's final shortlist, missing the nine-film cut in January 2011.

The mix-up is instructive about how India's Oscar selection works — and why it draws criticism nearly every year. The FFI's choice is a single official submission for an international prestige competition, and observers have long argued that the committee tends to favor films with star weight behind them over smaller, more artistically distinctive work. Peepli Live was itself an unusual choice: a debut director's dark satire, one of 2010's top five grossers, neither pure arthouse nor pure commercial fare.

The enduring tension is real even if this story's original headline was not: Indian cinema's enormous domestic commercial success and its hunger for international recognition run on different tracks. The films that fill theaters at home are built on terms quite different from the films that tend to succeed in the Academy's international competition. Peepli Live at least straddled both worlds — which is presumably why it won the FFI's nod.

We corrected the record because getting this one right matters. The credits go where they belong: to Rizvi, to her cast of unknown actors, and to a film that took on farmer suicides and the news media in the same breath.