Oscar Nominees announced and I get excited for the wrong reasons

It has become the norm that the beginning of every year is abuzz with Hollywood Award Season talk.  From Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills to Vilakazi Street in Soweto millions of people are in deep conversation and or debate about who is deserving of Hollywood’s top accolades.  Last week, I was one such person. My colleagues and I were so thrilled  about the announcement of the Academy Award nominations that we decided to have a competition to see who would predict the nominees in the various acting, directing and best picture categories.

Being the humble cinephile (A person with a passionate interest in cinema) that I am - I will not waste time telling you that I won that competition.  Though the victory made my week, my elation was cut short after realising that while celebrating knowledge of American cinema I had been oblivious to African talent making headway at those very awards.

So while I was busy predicting whether or not Quinton Tarantino or Steven Spielberg were going to get Oscar nods I had neglected to find out what African filmmakers were vying for the golden statuettes. I was mortified to discover a couple days later that – ‘Asad’, a short film shot in South Africa, had received an Oscar nod. What makes my ignorance even worse is the fact that the film had scooped Best Short Film awards at 13 festivals around the world during the past year. How had this film managed to fly under my movie radar?

The answer is simple, I - like many other Africans, am always preoccupied by what the likes of Hollywood and Bollywood are doing that we become unaware of the gems in our backyard. ‘Asad’ is one such gem - a coming of age fable of a Somali boy, named Asad, as he struggles to survive in his war-torn land. The movie takes us into the lives of ordinary people in a seaside village in Somalia, providing the audience with a glimpse into the daily struggles of ordinary Somalis living in a dysfunctional and failed state.

Now that the wool has been removed from my eyes, I am definitely rooting for ‘Asad’ to win the best Short Film Oscar – but the irony is no one seems to care. Everyone around me is too upset that Leonardo DiCaprio was snubbed at the 85^th Academy Awards.

Little One vies for Oscar

It has been reported that Director Darrell Roodt's latest film, "Little One", has been confirmed as South Africa's entry into the Best Foreign Film category for next year's Oscars. The announcement was made by the South African Academy Award Selection Committee and the National Film and Video Foundation.

"Yesterday", another film by Roodt, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005.If approved by the Oscars Academy Award Selection Committee, which makes its final selection of nominees in January, the film will represent South Africa at the 85th Annual Academy Awards in 2013.

Little One tells a story of a six-year-old girl (Vuyelwa Msimang), who is found left for dead on the dunes near a township in Johannesburg. She is found by a middle-aged woman, Pauline played by Lindiwe Ndlovu, who rushes her to hospital.

 Saving her life, it transpires that the little girl has been raped and her face beaten in so badly that she doesn't even look human anymore. The story then follows Pauline's journey as she becomes actively involved with the child's case, from going to the extreme of kidnapping the girl from the hospital after her unsuccessful attempt to adopt her, to conducting her own investigation into what happened to the little girl.