Oct 16: With the nomination of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya: The Royal Guard as the official entry of India for Oscar, much criticism and now the legal system interference has just made a mockery of our entire selection procedure of the Film Federation of India (FFI). Reportedly India may withdraw Eklavya film from Oscar foreign film category. But being the largest film industry of the world the question arises that do we really need an Oscar?
Bollywood the Hindi film Industry is the biggest one in the world and produces nearly thousands of movies each year but still not able to select the best one for any international award. In fact it was first Amir Khan’s Lagaan which was shortlisted for an Oscar in the foreign film category. This causes craze among Indian film producers to get listed in Oscar. But do we need an Oscar to prove our films are at par with Hollywood?
Again Bollywood does not represent the whole Indian film industry as there are many regional languages and like the south Indian, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Bhjopuri and other states do also make a huge amount of movies in regional languages. But our jury members don’t consider them seriously and this shows their run for Oscar with a ‘slavish mentality’ as said by director-producer Mahesh Bhatt. So where does our regional cinema stand? Why there is not much effort from government or Bollywood itself to bring regional films to main stream?
Our renowned actors like Amir Khan and Shahrukh Khan preferred to be recognized by international audience but with Oscar. But I don’t think Shahrukh Khan would be able to make it as long as he goes with the typical Khan movies. Amir on the other hand doesn’t attend any award function in India because he doesn’t favour the jury members but always on the front seat for Oscar. No doubt they are better than any Hollywood actor but why an Oscar?
If overseas business is the sole aim of our film industry then there are other ways to lure international audience apart from eyeing an Oscar award. India is one of the hottest tourist destinations in recent times and our government here can do a lot by arranging film festivals in different tourist places. Of course there are some but that again with many technical and managerial faults. Why can’t we make an award function like the OOOOOSCAR to judge foreign language film? Why our jury members prefer a good film not the better one that gives a chance to Hollywood in evaluating us? Our film fraternity should wake up and come together leaving this tom-jerry cat and mouse fight for an Oscar.
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