Six Oscar nominations for The Sixth Sense

Six Oscar nominations for The Sixth Sense
Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 15: Indian-American film maker Manoj Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense was nominated Tuesday for six Academy Awards, the second year running that an Indian-directed film has made a splash at the Oscars.

Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth was nominated for Best Picture last year, as has The Sixth Sense this year.

The Sixth Sense has also been named for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best supporting actor (for 10-year old Haley Joel Osment who plays a little boy who can see dead people living) and Best Supporting Actress.

Shyamalan both directed the taut movie and wrote the elegant screenplay and could thus land two golden statuettes. The unusually suspenseful film grossed nearly $300 million worldwide and is Disney's second highest grossing movie of all time after The Lion King.

This year's Oscars will also have two other South Asia connections. One of the most favoured nomination for the best documentary, Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club, is produced byDeepak Nayar. The Nepali film Caravan has been nominated for foreign-language film ahead of Deepa Mehta's Earth.But the most nominationseightfor this year's Oscars went to The American Beauty, a masterly portrayal of suburban America. The widely acclaimed film was named for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay among others.

Other movies in the running for Best Film include The Green Mile, The Insider, and The Cider House Rules. Both The Green Mile and The Insider were nominated for seven Oscars each.

The Academy Awards, or Oscars as they are simply called, is the acme of artistic achievements in moviedom. They will be given away in March 26 in Los Angeles at a ceremony that has begun to be broadcast worldwide in a testimony to the universal appeal of American movies.

The Sixth Sense is Shyamalan's fourth movie and it has pitchforked him into the category of elite Hollywood directors. With all his movies, Shyamalan has insisted on directing his own screenplays. Inhis last two movies, he has also insisted on the film being set in his native Philadelphia.

Typically, nominees in most of the 23 categories are chosen by specific branches of the Motion Picture Academy's 5,300 members, who are mostly other actors, directors and film editors. The coveted 8 1/2-pound statuettes are cast of an alloy of tin, copper and other common metals, then plated with copper, nickel, silver and gold. But their value lies in the way they can catapult the movie or its maker to greater fame and fortune.

In this case, while The Sixth Sense has run its course and raked in big bucks, Oscars could help under-performing movies like The American Beauty (which has grossed only $75 million) and Hurricane (for which Denzel Washington has been nominated for Best Actor and which has earned only $42 million). Oscar nominations also bump up video and DVD sales.