The Oscar awards may not have anything common with ‘Laddoos’, a traditional Indian sweet, but they found a common link in Chandigarh Monday.
As Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, on the execution of terrorist Osama Bin Laden, won an Oscar for sound editing at the 85th annual Academy Awards at Los Angeles, an actor-cum-line producer in Chandigarh distributed laddoos.
Darshan Aulakh, who acted as the ISI chief in Zero Dark Thirty, said he was “very happy” that the film had bagged the award. The film shared the sound editing award with another Hollywood film, Skyfall.
“I simply could not stop myself from breaking into a ‘bhangra’ jig,” said an elated Aulakh, as he distributed sweets during the shooting of Bollywood film Besharam (starring Ranbir Kapoor) being shot here.
Many parts of Zero Dark Thirty were shot in and around Chandigarh last year and Aulakh was the line producer for the film. His company, Darshan Aulakh Productions, arranges for the shooting of Bollywood films in this region. He has also acted in Bollywood and Punjabi films. Bigelow had re-created scenes of Pakistan’s towns in Chandigarh’s Mani Majra suburb during her shooting here. Indian flavour was predominant at the 85th Academy Awards, when Life of Pi, widely shot in India with Indian actors, won the maximum awards, including the best director’s trophy for Ang Lee. Life of Pi, based on Canadian author Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning eponymous novel, won four out of its 11 nominations at the 85th Academy Awards Sunday.
Lee thanked his Indian crew and also wowed everyone by saying ‘Namaste’ at the end of his acceptance speech. (IANS)