The moment 66th National Awards are announced, many Telugu audiences who anticipated that Ram Charan and Sukumar’s superhit bonanza Rangasthalam will clean sweep some categories, got pretty upset. That too, it bagged an award for Sound Mixing which none expected at all.
If we look at the reasons why Rangasthalam tumbled, there are not plenty, but only a few logical ones. For example, they couldn’t pick Rangasthalam over Mahanati in Best Film Regional category because the story of legendary actress Savitri is always a better film no matter how much it collected at the box office.
Ram Charan has delivered extraordinary performance in the role of hearing-impaired Chittibabu but that falls short of Ayushman and Vicky Kaushal’s work in Andhadhun and Uri respectively. Because Ayushman has used contact lenses that block his eyesight by 80% to film certain scenes in this movie and learned piano daily for six hours to play it for real in many scenes. So naturally, that effort is significant than what Charan has done for Rangasthalam. Coming to Vicky, with URI being a patriotic film and with BJP in power, it is politically logical to include his name on the list.
If we have to talk about Sukumar’s direction and screenplay, Rangasthalam is a pure commercial masala movie whereas the likes of Chi La Sow are a bit realistic films without any masala. Naturally, these Award Juries honour realistic looking films most of the time. We have to notice that the likes of Padmaavat also didn’t grab any awards.
At the end of the day, tumbling to get an award will not imply that Rangasthalam is not a worthy movie.
