SS Rajamouli’s son Karthikeya breaks silence on allegations of RRR team 'buying Oscar' and paying to be part of ceremony

RRR director SS Rajamouli’s son SS Karthikeya in his recent interview talked about spending Rs 80 crore on its Oscar campaign. He also mentioned the team of RRR actually spent some amount but it was nowhere close to the speculated amount. 

For the unversed, several reports stating that the RRR team spent a whopping  Rs 80 crore on the Oscar campaign are doing rounds on social media. In an interview with Galatta Plus, Karthikeya stated, “We wanted to wrap up things in Rs 5 crore. That was the plan but we ended up spending Rs 8.5 crore for the campaign. Special screenings were arranged in a couple of cities in the USA for RRR. We thought we need more shows in New York where we were lagging behind.”

He added, “People like Ram Charan, Jr NTR, Prem Rakshit, Kaala Bhairava, Rahul Sipligunj, Keeravani and Chandrabose were officially invited. Each of these nominees has a few seats which they can accommodate for people they’d like to bring. But they have to send out a mail to the Academy and tell them who they’re bringing along. So there are classes of seats and they have to be paid for. We paid around $1500 per seat in the lower level and $750 per seat for the top level. That’s about it.” He further mentioned thatan 'Oscar can’t be bought, people’s love can’t be bought'.

Helmed by SS Rajamouli, RRR is a fictional story based on the lives of two Telugu freedom fighters, Alluri Seetharama Raju and Komaram Bheem. Ram Charan and Jr NTR played lead roles, respectively. The film collected over Rs 1200 crore worldwide. Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn played essential characters in the movie. RRR's power-packed song Naatu Naatu` won the Oscar for Original Song beating heavyweight contenders like Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

Before entering the Oscars, the song bagged awards on the global stage. In January, Naatu Naatu won the Golden Globes in the Best Original Song category. Five days later, RRR bagged two more awards at the 28th edition of the Critics Choice Awards. One is for the best song and another is for the best foreign language film.