irdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a 2014 Oscar-winning drama film co-written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu whose previous assignments includeand. The movie stars Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, and Zach Galifianakis in major roles. Birdman is a departure from the contemporary style of filmmaking. Iñárritu devises a technique (perhaps, taking a leaf out of Alfred Hitchcock's) that gives an illusion as if the entire film were shot in a single extended take. Birdman's strong albeit bizarre dialogue and impeccable slapstick timing on one hand hark back to the works of the American screenwriter and playwright David Mamet, particularly, while on the other, it strongly reminds of the films likeandin that it deglamorizes Hollywood while exposing its hypocrisies in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner.

Birdman tells the story of Riggan Thomson—a washed up Hollywood actor, essayed by Michael Keaton, once famous for playing an iconic superhero called "Birdman"—as he battles both his inner demons and outer foes in a desperate attempt to reinvent himself as a Broadway director by staging a new adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". But, there is more to Riggan than meets the eye. Is he a tormented artist so committed to his art that he goes to the point of living his act? Or, is he a paranoid schizophrenic with suicidal tendencies? It is this dichotomy associated with Riggan that gives Birdman its true meaning and impetus. At the 87th Academy Awards, Birdman won in four of the nine categories it was nominated including the Best Picture and Best Direction

Boyhood— , edging past critics’ favorite

Patricia Arquette bagged the solitary Oscar for the Best Supporting Actress.

Emma Stone (left) and Edward Norton in Birdman

Birdman offers a nice blend of realism, surrealism and magic realism—à la Gabriel García Márquez. The movie has a strong undercurrent of dark humor but that doesn’t stop Iñárritu from posing several serious questions about the meaning of art, success and failure, life and death, and human existence. Birdman doesn't feed any definitive answers but rather allows the viewers to engage at their own intellectual planes. Birdman exalts artists, celebrating their commitment and dedication to art, while it belittles critics, deeming them incompetent to judge artistic works. While Birdman is best seen as a parody on the comic book superhero films that Hollywood churns out year in and year out, there’s no denying that Birdman is a significant superhero film in itself. Perhaps to exaggerate the effect (although Iñárritu hasn’t acknowledged it publicly whether it’s deliberate or not), almost all the major actors cast in the movie have, at one point or the other, been associated with a superhero flick: be it Michael Keaton (

), Edward Norton (

), or Emma Stone (

). Given the Academy’s lack of regard for the superhero genre, Birdman’s Best Picture win at this year’s Oscars is truly historic.



