Akshay Kumar breaks silence on National Award controversy

Winning a National Film Award is every actors dream – giving recognition for their hard efforts in Bollywood. Akshay Kumar is the latest recipient of this award, which was given to him last week.

However Kumar winning the award for his film ‘Rustom’ (2016) has been overshadowed with accusations that he won it through favouritism. Reported in Business Of Cinema, Kumar has opened up about this saying that there was no such thing and he has been judged purely on his own merits. “Itna keh sakta hun mai ki ye award bhi maine imaandari se jita hai. Maine aaj tak cheating nahi ki. Neither have I ever made a call to anyone to win an award nor have given money or done favours for it.”

The whole debate started when it was announced whether there were other deserving actors who could have been selected for the National Award, such as Amitabh Bachchan for ‘Pink’ (2016), Shahid Kapoor for ‘Udta Punjab’ (2016), Manoj Bajpayee’s as a gay professor in ‘Aligarh’ (2016) and Aamir Khan in ‘Dangal’ (2016).

Priyadarshan jumped to Kumar’s defence this week. He gave a statement with regards to the accusations, saying, “Akshay was given the best actor on the basis of his performance in two films — ‘Airlift’ and ‘Rustom’. It was the jury’s decision. One performance was dramatic and one was realistic. But according to the rule book, only one film can be mentioned and ‘Rustom’ was mentioned in the list. But the award recognises his performance in both the movies.”