Are Oscars fool-proof? Do they actually
select the best movie and best actor?
Though we all
tend to have a different opinion on who should be the ultimate winner of
Academy Award, do we not generally agree on the nominations at least? Take ‘12 years a Slave’ for example. Most people on the planet would concede that
it is indeed a well-made movie irrespective of cultural or ethnic
background. The same goes for ‘Gravity’.
Well-made movies,
irrespective of whether they win the Academy Award or not, tend to be recognized
as ‘well-made movies’ irrespective of the audience’s cultural or ethnic
background. If a villager in India is
shown these movies with subtitles or translations he would concede they are ‘well-made
movies’. Whether he would actually pay
for it in a cinema theater to watch it is a different matter altogether! If paying for the movies is the only
criterion - then we need to consider this fact – he would pay more to watch a
pornographic movie if it were to be shown in his village.
According to me,
Indians tend to love Indian movies for sheer nostalgia factor. It is like Kolkatans loving Kolkata just
because it is their home city – in spite of its extremely bad roads, bad
traffic, congested trains and buses. But
no observer, however incompetent he is, would ever put Kolkata as top ten
cities in the world. The minute we start
putting objective parameters for measurement, and remove the subjectivity of ‘love
for one’s home city’ from the list, Kolkata doesn’t stand a chance.
The same holds
true for Indian movies. Except for the
fact that we tend to love them because it perpetuates our love for them for
sheer nostalgic reasons, no objective criteria can place them in the category
of ‘well-made’ movies. Take the five nominated movies for the Best
Film by Filmfare. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Chennai
Express, Ram-Leela, Raanjhanaa, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. I didn’t watch the first one, so I cannot
comment. The other four movies do not
qualify as ‘well-made’ movies by any standard of movie-making, and it doesn’t
matter who the judge is – whether it is an American, Brazilian, Scandinavian,
African, Vietnamese, or Indonesian. And
if the Indian judge were to keep his ‘love for Indian movies’ aside, he would
not qualify them as well-made.
Aren’t Oscars overrated? Why should
Indians even bother?
Oscars may be
overrated. But by calling it overrated what exactly are we doing? We are basking in the faint glow that comes
from celebration of mediocrity in India Cinema while deluding ourselves that we
are getting a suntan out of it. A
society can never excel itself unless its people or its audience seek for
better or improved things – whether it is governance, music, sports or cinema. The sports in any country improves when the
spectators seek improvement, otherwise it will be a mockery event like it
happens in India wherein some of the college sports are completely unwatchable.
The same malaise which allows us to tell ourselves, ‘this is the best we can
do, so let’s rather not complain’ to our political leaders and bureaucrats,
also allows us to go in throngs to see extremely mediocre patchwork of
untalented artists looking cute, mumbling some words, to make what is called an
Indian movie.
What kind of
talent gets promoted in a movie industry is extremely important to any culture
or society – because it is one institution where talent, originality,
creativity score over everything else.
Unlike education and employment which are considered access to basic
opportunities to live a decent life, and therefore has to be guaranteed to
everyone, whereby quotas, reservations, affirmative actions are legislated or
imposed, the fields of arts, sports, cinema, on the other hand, are supposed to
be highly democratized and open, whereby the talent is recognized, celebrated
and rewarded.
Even during
ancient times, while most opportunities were closed to the privileged classes,
it was the field of arts, music, poetry, plays, which allowed people from
underprivileged classes to shine forth.
Even before the US administration and government treated blacks as
equals through legislation, it was sports, cinema and arts that allowed the
inclusion of blacks (of course with some prejudice still intact).
How did we end
up taking an institution that is supposed to promote excellence, talent,
creativity and originality to completely corrupt it whereby the mediocrity is
not just tolerated, but celebrated and rewarded? Is it because it was imposed onto us, or is
it because as people, as audience, reveled in this celebration and promoted it
to incrementally degrade it and debase so much so that now it is nothing but a
parade of unoriginality, mediocrity, plagiarism, untalented?
I have nothing
against Deepika Padukone. Poor girl! She
just cannot act. In any other country,
Argentina or France or Iran or Korea, she would not have won any audition. But in India, that completely untalented cute
girl is the paragon of Indian Arts. She
won the Best Actress Award. And that is
just sad. This corruption, degradation
and debasement did not happen overnight. It happened over many years, where
plagiarism was lapped up, then inability to act was lapped up, then extremely
bad storylines were lapped up. And very
soon, before we realized, those untalented people and those unoriginal works,
those mediocre patch works started to get awards.
It is like PhD
is in India. It is like technology creation
in India. Mediocrity is not just
promoted, but rewarded and celebrated. That’s
because we allow it, we tolerate it, we legitimize it, and then we
institutionalize it.
