Kutty Srank, a Malayalam drama starring Mammooty, expressing the different perspectives of three women about the man in their lives, was the biggest winner at the National Film Awards for 2009, sweeping the best feature film award as well as four other categories.
It led a crop of Malayalam films snapping at the heels of the Bollywood pack, which still took the highest number of feature film awards, with 15 awards being given to Hindi films. That included the best popular film 3 Idiots, the best film on national integration Delhi-6, best film on social issues Well Done Abba and the best debut film Lahore.
Silver screen superstar Amitabh Bachchan snagged most of the attention at the announcement of the Awards by the jury here on Wednesday, when he bagged his third award for best actor, this time for his role as a dying 13-year old in Paa. “To portray the role of Auro was not an easy thing,” said jury chair Ramesh Sippy, adding that it was a near-unanimous choice.
The best actress award went to Ananya Chatterjee for her role in the Bengali film Abohoman, which also won the best direction prize for Rituparna Ghosh.
The best film award in the non-feature category was shared by The Postman and Bilal.
Malayalam films managed to pick up 10 awards in the feature categories, with Oscar winner Resul Pookutty winning an award for best audiography in Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja. Music director Ilayaraja bagged the best background score award for the same film. The only Tamil film to capture the spotlight was Pasanga, which bagged awards for its child actors and screenplay dialogues, as well as in its own language category.
The award announcements were slightly marred by the number of times that Mr. Sippy apologetically stumbled over the pronunciation of names in non-Hindi languages. The Awards returned to a two-tier format this year, regional juries making a shortlist considered by a central team. The “recall” clause, which allowed the final jury to consider films left out by the lower tier also came into play with the Marathi Natarang and the Bengali Houseful picking up awards.
