What’s first thing that comes to your mind whenever you consider ‘Oscars’ or ‘Golden Globes’? Prestige. It’s not the same in regards to desi counterparts such as the 60 year old ‘Filmfare Awards’ or the much younger ‘Life OK Screen Awards’ (21 year old). ‘Oscars’, ‘Golden Globes’ and ‘Filmfare’ have one thing in keeping – an extended legacy spanning over a half century. Oscar celebrates 87th year in 2015 whereas Golden Globes celebrates 72th year. Hollywood awards are known for their fair and transparent process in selecting the winners. Over 6000 elite Academy members vote for Oscars to pick the yearly winners. For Golden Globes, it constitutes 93 prominent journalists from all over the world, that are members of Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), in the voting panel. When looking back, we could observe that these two major awards had a clean run without many controversies questioning their legitimacy & the choice process. Needless to say, a calculated campaigning can still sway the Oscar & Golden Globe voters – to some extent (as we witnessed in the event of Shakespeare In Love in 1999 and Crash in 2015)! Brushing aside such minor hiccups, these awards continue to remain relevant and prestigious. The same can’t be said about the Bollywood awards. Especially since we’ve several new award shows, the prestige is the final thing they’re bothered about. bigg boss 6 telugu voting
Where are Bollywood awards heading?
Well, it’s not maneuvering to a nice place – that’s certain! Controversies and corruption make it very hard for the Award shows to remain relevant & significant. Speaking of Filmfare awards, it’s a favorite award. The subscribers of the Filmfare magazine decide the winners through voting (however, they introduced critic’s choice awards for few major categories to create it less dull). As we all know, public is not at all times the very best judge in regards to quality of movies, acting and technical prowess. As Oscars realized, the people who work in the business are the very best to judge the merit of a movie or artist. Now it’s too late for Filmfare awards to change their format. So, let’s not hound them on that matter. However, at the very least they may be honest and fair in the manner in which they select the favorite awards. If you take a deeper look, despite giving good performances and milestone movies, Aamir Khan and his movies always missed Filmfare awards. Same may be said about Ajay Devgn as well. To refresh your memory, both Aamir Khan and Ajay Devgn spoke from the politics behind award shows. Aamir Khan boycotted most of the award shows (of course, except National Awards and Oscars). Time and again, we hear allegations that these awards are ‘fixed’ ;.It’s not just stars, fans likewise have spoken from the dirty picture behind awards.
Award shows are becoming an enormous televised event in India involving big money. So TRP matters. Who brings TRP? Big stars, who else! Don’t believe that it’s different in Hollywood. ABC, which is under contract to broadcast Oscars until 2020, resorts to all sorts of circus to increase the TRP of Oscars (did you forget Ellen Degenerator’s selfie stunt during last year’s Oscar Ceremony?) However, in Hollywood big stars don’t ask for cash or favours to attend these awards. If they are nominated they will definitely arrive at the red carpet and graciously cheer the winner despite their bitter losses. They understand the fact that maintaining a wholesome ecosystem of awards is a necessity for ensuring quality. In Bollywood, we hear all sorts of stories about the insane demands of stars in regards to attending award shows.’ If you should be not going to provide me an award and then don’t bother sending an invitation’ – this seems to be the motto of all of the major stars, according to various reports. This contributes to hilarious award categories. For the ‘best actor’ category, some award shows give as much as 5 different awards (best actor in a thriller, best actor in a drama, best actor in a comedy and goes on)! Chances are they invent very creative award categories to support a certain demanding actor! There clearly was a recent controversy regarding music awards, where Honey Singh was given best music director award ignoring A R Rahman & Amit Trivedi!
Bollywood fans have been discussing about the pointlessness of Bollywood awards on social networking like Twitter and Facebook. It looks like everyone except award show organizers is aware of this growing criticism. Speaking of Oscars, we’ve something similar in Bollywood. IIFA (Indian International Film Awards), which came into existence in 2000, is a worldwide Bollywood award show where nominations & winners are selected by peers in the industry. The glossy award function is usually held at an international venue outside India. Nevertheless, they keep honouring the least deserved winners. Moreover, they’re not far behind in regards to hilarious categories.
Simply speaking, Bollywood award scene is just a big mess right now. This is largely attributed to the fact that industry is disorganized to the core. They don’t have unity – they don’t have functional organizations for the actors and technicians. If they had, it could have been easier to allow them to conduct their particular award show modelled on Oscars. In that case, a reliable outside agency (an agency named PricewaterhouseCoopers has the responsibility for tabulating Oscar votes) are designed for the voting process to avoid politics and corruption. Also, it’d force the stars to attend the awards without requesting favours. This type of move could tidy up the system. But who is going to achieve that? The leading actors are in loggerheads most of the time. They fight over everything and their cold wars and camp systems are infamous in Bollywood. Therefore it would be a great deal to expect them to do something about this mess.