Oscar snub doesn't surprise Irrfan

While Mira Nair has openly said that Hollywood suffers from colour blindness after her resplendent film The Namesake failed to make it into any of the Oscar nominations, Mira's leading man Irrfan says he isn't the least disappointed.

"I knew The Namesake won't find favour at the Oscars. The culture and ambience were all very alien to the Americans. They live in a very enclosed kind of society where their culture and way of life is all that matters to them. To them, a film about a Bengali family was strange and alien. We're yet to make inroads in the West the way Chinese cinema has made. I mean, long before Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Bruce Lee had made a big impact on the Western audience. We from Indian cinema are yet to make that kind of an impact. But we're getting there."

Irrfan says he has suffered a much bigger blow at the Oscars. "And that was when my British film Warrior by Asif Kapadia failed to make it into the nomination for Best Foreign Film for a technical reason. The Academy rejected Warrior because it was a British film in Hindi. According to them, a British film can only be in English! Thank God, since then the language barriers have dissolved. But it was never fun while it lasted."