The 57th National Awards announced today, saw Amit Trivedi bag his debut Best Composer award for the brilliant score in Anurag Kashyap‘s Dev D. Best lyricist award went to Swanand Kirkire for Behti Hawa from 3 Idiots. Its Kirkire’s second shot at the awards after he won it a couple of years back for Bande Mein Tha Dum from Lage Raho Munnabhai, incidentally for the same crew of Rajkumar Hirani-Vidhu Vinod Chopra-Shantanu Moitra. Musical veteran Ilayaraja won a fourth National award after a long gap of two decades, this time for the background score of Malayalam movie Pazhassi Raja. Don’t remember hearing about a background music National award before this, which would make Ilayaraja the first recipient in this category! And though there are few in the industry who would be more deserving than Ilayaraja to receive this honour, presenting it for Pazhassi Raja is pretty much analogous to ARR winning the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. Nevertheless, better late than never! 🙂 The vocalist honours were both taken by Bengalis, Best Male singer going to Rupam Islam (lead singer of Bangla rock band Fossils, who has sung a song for Pritam in Jannat) for Mahanagar and his female counterpart being Nilanjana Sarkar for Houseful.
57th National Awards announced
