Their Filmfares
In an astonishingly audacious editorial a couple of days, the Times of India suggested that the Oscars were not democratic enough because "The time-honoured tradition of Oscar nominees and winners being chosen by a closed club of Academy members is feudal...".This is astonishing merely because as far as I can tell, the Academy Awards never set out to be a popularity contest, but more of a reward of excellence. Whether they get it right or not is a different question. I'm not going to "defend" the Oscars - there are several instances of them not getting things right (which anyway is a subjective call), and like the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is increasingly righting previous wrongs. But if you forget who the Oscar went to, and just look at each year's list of nominees, you will say a majority of them deserved to be there. This is more than what someone can say for entire categories at the Filmfare Awards.
The Filmfare awards want to, and desperately at that, be a popularity award first and not a critics award. Fair enough. But let's drop the hypocrisy of excellence, when all you want to do is engage in a massive backscratching exercise with no credibility - I mean, once you open the voting to the internet and SMS, as TOI so avidly advocates, the scripts take over.
The Filmfare awards have completely alienated a number of movie-goers (are we "significant"? dunno), but thanks to multiplexes, distributors, and technological revolutions, it's possible for us in the long tail to be sated somewhat. The days of giving the Best Film award to the likes of "Rajnigandha" and "Ardh Satya" are long gone. We've learnt to live with times when Kareena Kapoor wins a Critic's Award for "Best Actress" when several worthier actresses abound. But don't rub it in. Audiences have no business voting for technical categories such as Best Editing or Screenplay. Democracy doesn't guarantee excellence or even a sense of participation. We can live with awards given out by a "mai-baap" as long as it doesn't offend our senses.
7 comments:
Unless age has caught up with my memory banks, Rajnigandha goes down in the record books as the only film that won both the popular award and the critic's award for "Best Film"; now they're gunning for a patent on a "maximum satisfied recipient set" algorithm.
"a patent on a 'maximum satisfied recipient set" algorithm'"
- make that "a patent on a 'same recipients satisfied maximally set' algorithm"
well said. Gone are the days of excellence of Filmfare awards. Its a mere " SRK-Bachchan" extended family award today.
hey but i think you missed the point here. As much as I hate the Times, they're not wrong in saying the Oscars are not "democratic" enough. To be democratic of course means involving a lot of people.
If they're thereby insinuating that they're therefore not good, of course they are back to old crap.
abhishek: the academy is fairly big, about 5K members I think. Now yes, that's not a fair representation of the film-viewing population. But I wonder how much more democratic it should get to be satisfactory. Perhaps they should double the academy voters by randomly selecting members of the public. What the academy guys also do is to try and get the members to watch as many of the nominated films as possible. It is impractical to expect them to be seeing all and being fair, but this is surely better than the lay population here which is highly unlikely to spend megabucks - with ticket prices being what they are - on all "good" movies. The Dhoom-2s of the world will benefit at the expense of Khosla ka Ghosla or Black Friday. Hopefully people will watch the latter on TV screens - but that experience isn't always the same. Ultimately, it's a question of what you want to reward. You can term it Most Popular Actor and Actress, and leave the "Bests" to a slightly more discerning audience, even if it sounds elitist. But we live in times where even the National Awards have gone proudly populist.
George, Black, too, seems to have won the "Best Film" award in both the categories.
Infact all top 4 categories (best film,director,actor,actress)were won by Black!
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