Welcome to another entry in the vaunted Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! When I started this project five years ago I'd seen 214 Best Pic nominees, and since that time I've viewed an additional 150. Pretty cool, huh?
We're headed back to the mid-teens for one of the less-talked about Best Picture nominees of 2016, one that I kept putting off for whatever reason, the Garth Davis-helmed biographical drama Lion, starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. Based on actual events, Lion is the tale of a boy named Saroo from a tiny village in India, who in 1986 got separated from his family when he fell asleep on an empty train one night, waking up hundreds of miles away in a different region of the country with an entirely different language. After months of living on the streets he was brought to the police by a concerned citizen and placed in an overcrowded orphanage, and ultimately adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty years later as an adult, Saroo is on his way to a promising career in the hotel business, but finds himself suddenly obsessed with reconnecting with the life he'd left behind. The problem is he never learned his mother's full name, nor the correct name of his village, and the train stop he remembers is one of hundreds in the region.
