How relevant are Indian film awards? We find out…
Have you ever watched an Indian film award ceremony and felt totally lost? Did you lose interest halfway when you realised everybody on the list was going to end up with one award or the other? Oh, well, you are watching one of the Indian film awards. With so many brand endorsing awards and so many corporate nitty-gritty at stake, everybody seems to be walking away with an award.
Be it Popular Choice, Audience Choice, Critics Choice, The Sponsors’ Choice and so on, there is no limit to these fancy awards. So your favourite celeb is definitely going to be walking away with an award. Is that a good thing or bad? Your guess is as good as ours! Since everybody who has been nominated gets an award, what’s the point of these fancy trophies? In a bid to satisfy every sponsor, actor and their loyals fans, the awards have lost their importance.
As they say in film circles, you can ‘buy awards’ these days. Say you’re the brand ambassador for a product, which also happens to be sponsoring a big awards gala…and you’ve been nominated for one of the awards. Isn’t it obvious that you would be pushed? It’s simple business and not the celebration of art and talent. If you have a lot of clout in Bollywood by virtue of being a biggie producer, filmmaker of investor, you’d have an absolute say in the awards, along with the power to veto. It’s this dynamics that has people worried and probably why Bollywood is called a dangerous place to be in! Those golden days of anticipating an actor’s win are long gone as you know there is power play involved and genuine talent is really of no use or importance.
Even actors are happy with this development, as long as their movies do roaring business at the box office. They don’t really care about awards as their biggest concern is to entertain. If they happen to take home the black lady, along with a massive hit…it’s a bonus! Salman Khan, despite a string of massive blockbusters to his name, hasn’t won the Best Actor award in a long time. The one-film-a-year actor, Aamir Khan hasn’t walked up to the podium in a long time either! Nobody knows who sits on the selection committee as these deals aren’t transparent.
Perhaps why the entire nation is panning India’s Oscar-entry ‘The Good Road’ as viewers foind Ritesh Batra’s debut venture ‘The Lunchbox’ more appealing. We don’t know if the Gujarati fare will make it to the top 5 at the Oscars, but it would be a shame if it doesn’t. Netizens and Twitterarti were criticizing the Film Fraternity of India for being biased. This does make us think about the whole process of selecting movies being rigged, doesn’t it? With money having more say than talent, the only thing Bollywood hasn’t been able to ‘buy’ is the audiences. But that day isn’t far when we are all in hand in gloves with the B-Towners. After all, everybody likes a good, juicy deal, no?
