The Great Film Awards Jambooree

An eye opener... something needs to be done for the awards at the Film Level...

It's the Bollywood season again. That time of the year which starts the series of Filmi awards right from Screen, Sansui, Filmfare, Zee Cine, IIFA to name a few.

The guidelines for judging the excellence for each award vary from another. Screen has a complete jury based system while Filmfare is 50 percent votes (magazine readers and online voting mechanism) and 50 percent jury. Sansui and Zee are only viewers' votes. And each one claims to be fair. But what do our audience's and media think?

Coming to the nominations, every year we have atleast one controversy over a nominee who withdraws citing irregularities. This year we had Manoj Bajpai withdrawing his nomination from the Best Supporting Actor in the Screen Awards since he was not nominated in the Best actor category. JP Dutta also publicly withdrew LOC-Kargil from Screen. We have Aamir Khan who does not attend awards because he feels all of them are biased. And to top it all, we have the ace filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, who does not believe in the awards system at all. At the other end, we have Shahrukh Khan, who has the maximum Filmfare Awards in his kitty!

Some of the awards also create special categories to keep everybody happy. For example: Best Actor category and Most Outstanding Performance category. That way, you ensure that everybody is happy and smiling…at least in the front of the camera!

IndiaFM ran a poll to rate the credibility of the awards. A total of about 1.2 million respondents have given their verdict loud and clear. About 45% of the respondents felt that all the existing awards were arbitrary and unfair in some manner.
They think very poorly of the awards in terms of credibility. The maximum that any award could manage was Filmfare, which was judged fair by as low as 40% of the respondents. For all the others, it was pathetic. National awards are judged fair by only 15%. For the other awards, the less said the better, for their trust % was in single digits.

Our awards are all about money, honey. So basically the awards benefit everybody, the organiser who makes the moolah, the TV channel who gets software and sponsors for the event, the media who get an event to go ga-ga about, the print who gets stories to fill up the paper, and most of all the nominees, who get talked about and get the photo-ops and write-ups. And finally the winners, who get to make their thank you speeches. And the way the system works, each performer will win some or the other awards. And most of all, none of those involved speak out because all awards are controlled by some or the other media house. So nobody wants to enter in the bad books of any media house, for that would mean no publicity, which in effect is a hara-kiri, for what is a celebrity without publicity.

You have the PNC-Sansui 'VIEWER'S CHOICE AWARDS', which not only nominates its own movies and performers in as many as 8 categories. And then it insults our intelligence by wanting us to believe that majority of 'PUBLIC' has voted for Juhi Chawla as the best supporting actress for the movie Jhankaar Beats, which is a PNC production.

Incidentally, most of the PNC product nominees have not been nominated in any other awards. When it failed to get Kareena in Chameli any awards, they give her a jury award for best performance for Chameli, which is another PNC production. And the icing on the cake is that PNC released Chameli in only one show in one theatre in December 03 to be eligible for the awards.

Coming to the media coverage, Filmfare Awards are not covered by rival publications since Times Group is associated with the same. Similarly, Screen Videocon awards are not covered by other publications. Zee Cine Awards are also not covered by rival channels. Can you imagine Oscars not covered by a single newspaper or a channel?

Now let's compare our awards to the Oscars

Membership in the Academy is limited to those who have achieved the highest level of distinction in the arts and sciences of motion pictures.

Members currently represent 14 branches — Actors, Art Directors, Cinematographers, Directors, Documentary, Executives, Film Editors, Music, Producers, Public Relations, Short Films and Feature Animation, Sound, Visual Effects, and Writers. At this time, there are over 5,700 voting members of the Academy.
Up to five nominations are made in most categories, with balloting for these nominations restricted to members of the Academy branch concerned. Directors, for instance, are the only nominators for Achievement in Directing.
Final winners in most categories are determined by vote of the entire voting membership of over 5,700 individual filmmakers.

Even a nomination in Oscars is considered an honour. An Oscar means added box office revenue and a global TV audience. Compare this to Indian awards and you will find that Indian awards do not contribute to an increase in audience or collections.

The need of the hour is an award on the lines of Oscars. An award that truly recognizes the excellence in cinema. And one that is handled by the peers in the industry, for the industry and not some media house for its own benefit. Will somebody take the lead to light the light?