Critics Predict an Oscar for Kenya Actress Lupita

Lupita Nyong'o at Toronto International film festival.

Lupita Nyong'o has charmed Hollywood. Critics have lauded her performance in the Hollywood movie, 12 Years a Slave as one fit "for an Oscar nod". The movie is being screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the BFI London Film Festival on October 18.
The movie follows the real-life story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a musician and free black man with a family in Saratoga, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. He’s forcibly sent to a plantation where other slaves include Patsey, played by Lupita, a star cotton picker, but of more value as the woman who satisfies the ‘predilections and peculiarities’ of the estate’s brutal owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).
Speaking to Daily Mail, Lupita said, "Chiwetel was gentle with me, So was Michael. They were both concerned about what I was going through because they had to do these brutal things," Lupita said of the whipping scenes where the master whips Patsey, then when it becomes too much he forces Solomon to take over lashing her.
The audiences that have seen the movie at the festival gave it a “thunderous applause” and a “standing ovation”, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Lupita also spoke about her other movie projects. "I wanted a comedy or a thriller, so I made a film with Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore and Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery and we both play air stewardesses."
Liam plays an air marshal who takes on an American terrorist threatening to kill a flight passenger every 20 minutes, unless the marshal kills himself. Lupita has signed up to play an air hostess named Gwen in the film.

She has moved from being an assistant of actor Ralph Fiennes of The Constant Gardener to an shinning star in Hollywood. "I bumped into Ralph on the street in Telluride after he’d seen the film and he was saying: “Was that you?!”," Lupita said.