Filmmaker AR Murugadoss Calls Priyadarshan Led National Award Jury Biased

The 64th National Awards has been embroiled in controversy ever since the winners names were announced on Friday. While many of the critically acclaimed films of 2016 have been blatantly ignored, it is the news of Akshay Kumar winning the Best Actor award for Rustom that has created much noise, especially on social media.

Filmmaker AR Murugadoss has accused the chairperson of this year’s jury, filmmaker Priyadarshan of being biased towards Akshay Kumar, with whom the director has done several films in the past.

Murugadoss took to Twitter and wrote, “#NationalAwards Can clearly witness the influence & partiality of people in jury, it's biased.(sic)”

Earlier, Hansal Mehta, whose film Aligarh did not win a single award despite being critically acclaimed, questioned the Jury’s decision.

Meanwhile, Priyadarshan has defended the jury’s decision by saying Amitabh Bachchan and Ajay Devgn had also won National Awards when their respective frequent collaborators Ramesh Sippy and Prakash Jha were heads of the panel, but no one questioned it at that time.