"I knew The Namesake won't find favour at the Oscars. The culture and ambience were all very alien to the Americans.
They live in a very enclosed kind of society where their culture and way of life is all that matters to them. To them a film about a Bengali family was strange and alien.We're yet to make inroads in the West the way Chinese cinema has made.
I mean, long before Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Bruce Lee had made a big impact on the Western audience. We from Indian cinema are yet to make that kind of an impact. But we're getting there."
Irrfan says he has suffered a much bigger blow at the Oscars.
"And that was when my Brittish film Warrior by Asif Kapadia failed to make it into the nomination for Best Foreign Film for a technical reason.
The Academy rejected Warrior because it was a British film in Hindi. According to them a British film can only be in English! Thank God, since then the language barriers have dissolved. But it was never fun while it lasted."