'RRR' Rides High With Five Nods From Critics Choice Awards

New Delhi: Days after "RRR" bagged two Golden Globe nominations, the period action film on Wednesday secured five nods at the 28th annual Critics Choice Awards including 'Best Picture' and 'Best Director'.

Starring Ram Charan and Jr NTR, the movie is also nominated in the 'Best Foreign Language Film', 'Best Song' for Telugu track "Naatu Naatu" and 'Best Visual Effects' categories.

The nominations were announced by the Los Angeles-based 'Critics Choice Association' on its official website.

The makers of "RRR" thanked the jury in a statement shared on the film's official 'Twitter' page.

" 'RRR' movie has been nominated in five categories for the prestigious Critics Choice Awards. Thanking the jury for recognising 'RRR'," the post read.

Other best picture nominees are: "Avatar: The Way of Water", "Babylon", "The Banshees of Inisherin", "Elvis", "Everything Everywhere At Once", "The Fabelmans", "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery", "Tar", "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Women Talking".

"RRR" director SS Rajamouli will compete with James Cameron ("Avatar: The Way of Water"), Damien Chazelle ("Babylon"), Todd Field ("Tar"), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ("Everything Everywhere At Once"), Martin McDonagh ("The Banshees of Inisherin"), Sarah Polley ("Women Talking"), Gina Prince-Bythewood ("The Woman King") and Steven Spielberg ("The Fabelmans") in the 'Best Director' category.

For the 'Best Foreign Language Film', other contenders are "All Quiet on the Western Front", "Decision To Leave", "Argentina, 1985", "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths" and "Close".

Other nominees in the 'Best Song' category are "Carolina" ("Where The Crawdads Sing"), "Ciao Papa" ("Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), "Hold My Hand" (Top Gun: Maverick"), "Lift Me Up" ("Black Panther: Wakanda Forever") and "New Body Rhumba" ("White Noise").

"Top Gun: Maverick", "Avatar: The Way of Water", "The Batman", "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" and "Everything Everywhere At Once" are also part of the 'Best Visual Effects' category line-up.

On Monday, "RRR" scooped two Golden Globe nominations - 'Best Picture - Non-English' and 'Best Song' for "Naatu Naatu".

"Naatu Naatu" has been composed by MM Keeravaani and penned by Kala Bhairava and Rahul Sipligunj.

Billed as a pan-India film, "RRR" follows a pre-independence fictional story woven around two real-life Indian revolutionaries - Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem - in the 1920s.

The film released worldwide in March in five languages - Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi.

Also featuring Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn in key roles, "RRR" emerged as a massive box office success even overseas with reported earnings of Rs 1,200 crore.

The ceremony for the Critics Choice Awards will be held on January 15 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles.