It’s a serious tragedy that India’s Oscar Committee has decided against submitting Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine As Light, a truly masterful piece of feminist social portraiture that I went apeshit for during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, in favor of Kiran Rao‘s Laapataa Ladies, a seemingly lightweight comedy about young marrieds.

The first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years, All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Jury Prize last May while putting Kapadia on the map as a major, auteur-grade director.

Choosing Laapataa Ladies as India’s official submission for 2024’s Best Int’l Feature Oscar is like….there are 100 analogies I could mention. It would be like a 1961 scenario in which Richard Thorpe‘s The Honeymoon Machine is officially submitted to a major international film festival instead of, say, Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler

The people who chose Laapataa Ladies instead of Kapadia’s film are obviously taste-free serfs, and probably corrupt ones at that.