It is perhaps the sweetest wake-up call for Indian cinema. Tiny Bhutan has effortlessly beat India, the big film bully in the neighbourhood, as the Bhutanese Pawo Choyning Dorji’s charming film Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom, has earned an Oscar nomination in a key category, for Best International Feature. With Dorji’s very first feature, in the Dzongkha language, he is up against some heavyweight fellow nominees: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (Japan), Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee (Denmark), Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God (Italy), and Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (Norway). 

Dorji is in Hollywood, and seen dressed in an elegant red gho (knee-length Bhutanese robe), with his American-Taiwanese actress-producer wife Stephanie Lai. The Oscar award ceremony will be held on March 27. Your jaw drops as you watch Ang Lee, no less, interviewing Dorji on YouTube, but the disarming, gorgeous, long-maned, Buddhist Dorji, remains unruffled. Rintu Thomas and Susmit Ghosh of India, are also in Hollywood, having earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature for Writing with Fire, on Khabar Lahariya, India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women. Congratulations to all of them!