Is it only me or are there other people also out there who think that there is something fishy about all these Bollywood movie awards? Times of India yesterday ran a full page story on this year’s Filmfare awards (Filmfare being a sister publication commanded natural space) and the list of awardees was well, how should I put it, a bit like reading a half well selected Indian team. It raises your eyebrows but only in a mild arc. Of course, you can always argue that all the awards doled out in India end up raising more than just arc – usually they raise a ruckus, mostly by those who have missed out and in the case of Milkha Singh a few years ago even by those who have received it. So why should yours truly raise his eyebrows only at poor Bollywood and at Filmfare? Perhaps because they came a week after the Oscars and howsoever illogical this may sound, I couldn’t help drawing a comparison. And perhaps because, Filmfare still claims to award India’s equivalent of the Oscars. It is rightly the oldest film awards function in Bollywood and can claim to command a certain degree of respect, perhaps by its sheer weight of history.
In the recent years of course, that respect, credibility and the comfort zone of Filmfare has been challenged by a slew of ‘me too’ clones. All you need these days of course is a publication that lends the media machine to your awards, a television channel that will ensure the sponsors and the entertainment factor and a lead sponsor to shell out all those mega bucks to the dancing stars. The trend was started by Screen (with Indian Express and Star), followed by Zee and now you have those hideous India International Film Awards that are a blatant way to rip off money from all those pravasi bhartiyas crazy about Hindi films (to the extent that they are held every year in an offshore destination; though I would like to see how many dollars the pravasis would shell out in this time of a downturn or perhaps it might well be yours and mine TV eyeballs that would bankroll the event). What all this does mean is that there is a competitive pressure amongst all these awards and since sponsors and revenues shall all be decided by the TV ratings, it becomes imperative to ensure that those don’t drop. And the safest way to guarantee TV ratings is to make sure that you get SRK to dance. But why should SRK dance at one function and not at another. So in this competition enters another element now. Give the star an award, give him a reason to attend and then make him dance. Everyone goes home happy – the star gets awarded, the commercial film gets lauded, sponsors make money and TV gets rating. And credibility? Ah pray what’s that again please??
Of course, the above is just a theory and conjecture (I want to qualify that, you never know when this blog might hurt the sensibilities of an idiot who might then drag me to court, as is happening with disturbing frequency recently) – but as I look down the list of the Filmfare awardees this year I can’t help but get that uncomfortable churn. Was Hrithik’s seriously a better performance than Nasser’s in ‘A Wednesday’? Was ‘Jodha Akbore (oops Akbar!) seriously a better film than say a ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ or an ‘A Wednesday’, a ‘Dev D’ or even ‘Rock On’ in terms of its narrative, tightness of script and communication of message? To satisfy any such concern, all these awards have found a convenient circumnavigation tool called ‘Critics Awards’. It’s a bit like handing out a return gift to the kids at a birthday party, a mere tool to acknowledge a presence and to keep the noise level down. So this year, Mumbai Meri Jaan has taken most of the Critics Awards. Movies like Oye Lucky have also found luck in the technical categories like Dialogue, categories about which the TV viewing public and the sponsors don’t give a fig about. But when it comes to the big draws, the Best Actors, Directors and Movie, big budget cinema (I won’t use the word successful since there always seems to be a debate about whether a movie was ‘hit’ or ‘miss’) called the shots.
Whatever we might think about the snobbishness and early morning shenanigans of the Oscars, you have to give them credit on two counts. One, they manage to achieve the right amount of slick quotient required for high quality TV coverage and second, agree or not with the final list of rewards, you would hardly find any controversies about the nominations. Most of them would deserve their place. In fact the Academy quite often supplants the big studios and doles out Uncle Oscar to the small budget ones. Surprisingly they manage to affect this snub and still put forward an effective TV show. A movie like the ‘The Dark Knight’ managed two Oscars out of eight nominations with one of them being the certainty of Heath Ledger’s win. Had it been India, the movie would have swept the awards circuit by the sheer weight of its collections. Not taking away anything from Chris Nolan who as a critic remarked ‘created Shakespeare out of a comic book’, there were perhaps other and deeper performances that pipped the caped crusader. Of course, the Oscars are not without their share of murmurs and some newspapers claimed that Slumdog was nominated and won a bundle of awards simply to ensure that TV revenues from the sub-continent were high. It was a bit like that old argument about Indians winning Miss Universe and Miss World titles so that Fair and Lovely could sell more (when was the last time an Indian girl won a beauty pageant by the way?? And is Fair and Lovely still selling despite all those national setbacks at Miss Universe and Miss World contests?)
Perhaps a way out could be to have an industry body conducting the awards. I remember seeing a Producers’ Guild Awards on NDTV last year and you could instantly see why such an idea will hit so many roadblocks in India. The audience present could not even fill a school auditorium and almost none of the major winners in the ‘popular’ categories of music and acting were present. Maybe in India we should stop fretting and simply accept that our awards are weighed towards commercial success and that it shall often be difficult to break that glass ceiling and bring an element of credibility. The only way out is to then treat them as those doling out these awards do – not recognition of cinematic excellence but simply as toffee handouts on the birthday party. The bigger fist shall get the lion’s share. The spectacled geeky boy shall be shoved around and then pitied and handed a token to assuage everyone’s conscience.
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Can the Election Commission please announce the election dates and spare us all the agony of looking at full page government advertisements and blaring declarations of achievement on radio by various state ‘sarkars’. I am amazed to see that after so many years of inactivity, every day India is seeing a flurry of inaugurations and foundation stones. Of course, in our country, foundation stones remain just that - stones. The only ones benefiting from all this wasteful expenditure of your and my money are media companies designing these ads, the singers and actors finding employment in them and the print media that gets almost five to six pages of sarkari income every day. Perhaps the government can put a charitable spin on it and say that this is a thinly veiled bailout package for the Times of India and the Hindustan Times. Who cares about public money as long as the monkeys can scratch each other’s backs?
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