2021 Oscar award for actor in a leading role was won by _________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Anthony Hopkins. The award for actor in a leading role at the 93rd Academy Awards, whose ceremony was held on 25 April 2021, went to Sir Anthony Hopkins for his performance in 'The Father', in which he plays a man losing his hold on his own memory and on the identity of the people around him. He was eighty-three at the time and became the oldest winner of an acting Academy Award; it was his second Oscar, the first having come nearly three decades earlier for 'The Silence of the Lambs'. The construction of the option set is what makes this question worth studying, because every one of the four names was nominated at that same ceremony and three of them in categories other than the one asked about. Riz Ahmed was a fellow nominee for actor in a leading role, for 'Sound of Metal'; Paul Raci was nominated for actor in a supporting role for the same film; and Anders Hammer was nominated, with Charlotte Cook, for the documentary short subject 'Do Not Split'. So the paper is not testing whether a candidate can recognise an Oscar nominee — all four qualify — but whether he knows which category each was nominated in and which of them actually won. A candidate who remembers 'Sound of Metal' as the film of the year in the acting categories will be pulled towards two different wrong options. That is a deliberate design and it recurs throughout this paper's current-affairs block, where option sets are drawn from a single tight category so that partial recall gives no advantage. For completeness, the other principal awards of the same evening are worth carrying alongside this one: 'Nomadland' won best picture, its director Chloe Zhao won for directing, becoming only the second woman to do so, and Frances McDormand won for actress in a leading role in the same film.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Paul Raci was nominated at the same ceremony, but in a different category: actor in a supporting role, for 'Sound of Metal', in which he plays the head of a shelter for deaf recovering addicts. He did not win, and in any event the question asks about the leading role. He is placed first in the option list precisely because a candidate who has read that 'Sound of Metal' was heavily nominated in the acting categories may pick either of the two actors from that film without checking which category is being asked about. The general defence is to read the category in the stem as carefully as the year — leading role and supporting role are separate awards for men and for women, so an Academy Awards question always has at least four acting answers available for a single ceremony.  (b) Anders Hammer is not an actor at all. He is a journalist and film-maker who was nominated at the 93rd Academy Awards, together with Charlotte Cook, in the category of documentary short subject, for 'Do Not Split'. His presence in a list of actors is the sharpest form of the trick this question plays: the four names share nothing except a nomination at the same ceremony, so a candidate relying on the feeling that he has seen the name in the Oscars coverage will treat all four as equally plausible. Knowing what a nominee was nominated for, and not merely that he was nominated, is what separates a usable memory of an awards cycle from a useless one, and it costs one extra word per entry in a candidate's notes.  (d) Riz Ahmed is the strongest of the three wrong options because he was nominated in the very category the question asks about — actor in a leading role, for his performance as a drummer losing his hearing in 'Sound of Metal'. He did not win; the award went to Anthony Hopkins. A candidate who recalls that the film was prominent in the acting categories of that year, and who does not remember the outcome, has a genuine reason to choose this name and will still lose the mark. The item therefore rewards the specific fact rather than the general impression, which is the standing rule of the awards section: a nomination is not a win, and MPSC asks about wins.

Concept: The Academy Awards are conferred annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States and are the most widely reported film honours in the world. The ceremony held on 25 April 2021 was the ninety-third, and it covered films of the preceding period; its principal awards went to 'Nomadland' for best picture, to Chloe Zhao for directing, to Frances McDormand for actress in a leading role and to Anthony Hopkins for actor in a leading role in 'The Father'. Zhao's win made her the second woman to receive the directing award. Hopkins, at eighty-three, became the oldest winner of an acting award, and his win was his second, after 'The Silence of the Lambs'. For an Indian candidate the useful frame is comparative: the Oscars are decided by the members of an industry academy by ballot, while India's National Film Awards are conferred by the Government of India on the recommendation of juries appointed for the purpose, and the two therefore differ in what they reward and in how a decision is reached. It is also worth keeping the year convention straight. An Academy Awards ceremony held in one calendar year honours films of the preceding period, so the '2021 Oscars' and 'the 2021 films' are not the same thing, and a question that names a year is nearly always naming the ceremony.

State PCS 2021 Q95 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q95 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer