Critics Choice Awards: S.S. Rajamouli's RRR to compete with Avatar 2 for Best Picture, bags 4 more nominations

  Days after " RRR " bagged two Golden Globe nominations, the period action film on Wednesday secured five nods at the 28th annual Critics Choice Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

Starring Ram Charan and Jr NTR, the movie is also nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film, Best Song for Telugu track "Naatu Naatu", and Best Visual Effects categories.

The nominations were announced by the Los Angeles-based Critics Choice Association on its official website.

The makers of "RRR" thanked the jury in a statement shared on the film's official Twitter page.

"#RRRMovie has been nominated in 5 categories for the prestigious @CriticsChoice Awards. Thanking the Jury for recognising #RRR. #CriticsChoiceAwards," the post read.

#RRRMovie has been nominated in 5 categories for the prestigious @CriticsChoice Awards💥💥💥💥💥

Thanking the Jury for recognising #RRR. #CriticsChoiceAwards pic.twitter.com/tcCSgN8bl2

— PEN INDIA LTD. (@PenMovies) December 14, 2022

Other best picture nominees are: "Avatar: The Way of Water", "Babylon", "The Banshees of Inisherin", "Elvis", "Everything Everywhere At Once", "The Fabelmans", "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery", "Tar", "Top Gun: Maverick", and "Women Talking".

"RRR" director SS Rajamouli will compete with James Cameron ("Avatar: The Way of Water"), Damien Chazelle ("Babylon"), Todd Field ("Tar"), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ("Everything Everywhere At Once"), Martin McDonagh ("The Banshees of Inisherin"), Sarah Polley ("Women Talking"), Gina Prince-Bythewood ("The Woman King"), and Steven Spielberg ("The Fabelmans") in the Best Director category.

For the Best Foreign Language Film, other contenders are "All Quiet on the Western Front", "Decision To Leave", "Argentina, 1985", "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths" and "Close".

Other nominees in the Best Song category are "Carolina" ("Where The Crawdads Sing"), "Ciao Papa" ("Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), "Hold My Hand" (Top Gun: Maverick"), "Lift Me Up" ("Black Panther: Wakanda Forever") and "New Body Rhumba" ("White Noise").

"Top Gun: Maverick", "Avatar: The Way of Water", "The Batman", "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", and "Everything Everywhere At Once" are also part of the Best Visual Effects category line-up.

On Monday, "RRR" scooped two Golden Globe nominations -- Best Picture - Non-English and Best Song for "Naatu Naatu".

"Naatu Naatu" has been composed by MM Keeravaani and penned by Kala Bhairava and Rahul Sipligunj.

Billed as a pan-India film, "RRR" follows a pre-independence fictional story woven around two real-life Indian revolutionaries -- Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem -- in the 1920s.

The film released worldwide in March in five languages -- Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Hindi.

Also featuring Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn in key roles, "RRR" emerged as a massive box office success even overseas with reported earnings of Rs 1,200 crore.

The ceremony for the Critics Choice Awards will be held on January 15 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles.