Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Indian movies at Oscars II


In response to my previous blog, some commenters (on another social networking site) have justified why Indian movies continue to be the way they tend to be – they said, ‘these movies titillate the masses, they give the people an escape from reality, they tend to make money or business case’. 

No dispute on that. 

On the justification of Indian movies continuing to be the way they tend to be – the best comparison that I can make is with pornography.  The pornographic movies also tend to titillate the masses, give the people an escape from reality, and they tend to make money. [I am afraid that pornography industry may take umbrage at that comparison, because it tends to throw up actors better than Deepika Padukone or Tusshar Kapur; and some soft porn movies have better script than Ram-Leela]. 

Upon inspection, the comparison seems to be apt in many respects – the acting skills are confined to having a repertoire of one or two expressions which are repeated throughout the movie, and is considered quite OK.   The script is sometimes completely absurd where anything goes – fiction is mixed with fact at the whims and fancy of the director and the audience has no problem in accepting such absurdities, all in the name of enjoyment.  The editing is sometimes much better in the pornography compared to some of the Indian movies. 

The award ceremonies are also very similar.  While the Academy devotes only 4 awards to actors out of a total of 24, giving importance to various other aspects of movie making like visual effects and makeup, Indian movie awards tend to focus on trying to satisfy as many actors as possible – with categories like best villain and best comedian.  In some award functions, the actor’s fathers and mothers are also felicitated.

The comparison in awards continues.  Most Indian movie awards have a category for ‘best debutante’ or ‘best newcomer’ which no other serious movie awards dole out – once again this comes from pornography industry which gives out an award for ‘best new starlet’. 

At the outset, Indian Cinema is a substitute for pornography, and I believe that Indian Cinema will improve if we allow pornography in this country – that way the whole idea of ‘titillating and entertaining the masses’ will move towards pornography where the actresses like Deepika Padukone would may get the best actress awards, while the mainstream will automatically be forced to improve.  

1 comment:

  1. Strangely enough you are considering bollywood as indian cinema.That attitude is wrong.There are much more cinema industries are there in india other than bollywood where much more better films are being produced most of the time.

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