What’s first thing that concerns your brain when you consider ‘Oscars’ or ‘Golden Globes’? Prestige. It’s not the same when it comes to desi counterparts like 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 accordance – a lengthy 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 select the yearly winners. For Golden Globes, it constitutes 93 prominent journalists from throughout the world, that are members of Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), in the voting panel. When looking back, we are able to note that both of these 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 case of Shakespeare In Love in 1999 and Crash in 2015)! Brushing aside such minor hiccups, these awards continue to stay relevant and prestigious. Exactly the same can’t be said about the Bollywood awards. Especially since we have several new award shows, the prestige is the last thing they are bothered about. bigg boss telugu vote
Where are Bollywood awards heading?
Well, it’s not heading to a nice place – that’s certain! Controversies and corruption ensure it is quite difficult for the Award shows to stay relevant & significant. These are Filmfare awards, it’s a well known award. The subscribers of the Filmfare magazine decide the winners through voting (however, they introduced critic’s choice awards for few major categories to make it less dull). As most of us know, public is not at all times the very best judge when it comes to quality of movies, acting and technical prowess. As Oscars realized, the folks who work available are the very best to judge the merit of a video 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 can be honest and fair in the way they select the popular awards. Invest the a closer 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 against the politics behind award shows. Aamir Khan boycotted all of the award shows (of course, except National Awards and Oscars). Time and again, we hear allegations why these awards are ‘fixed’ ;.It’s not only stars, fans also have spoken against the dirty picture behind awards.
Award shows have grown to be a massive televised event in India involving big money. So TRP matters. Who brings TRP? Big stars, who else! Don’t think that it’s different in Hollywood. ABC, that will be under contract to broadcast Oscars until 2020, resorts to a number of circus to boost 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 wait 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 maintaining a healthier ecosystem of awards is essential for ensuring quality. In Bollywood, we hear a number of stories about the insane demands of stars when it comes 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 a lot of the major stars, in accordance with various reports. This results in 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 dilemma, best actor in a comedy and goes on)! Then they invent very creative award categories to accommodate a specific demanding actor! There clearly was a current controversy regarding music awards, where Honey Singh was presented with best music director award ignoring A R Rahman & Amit Trivedi!
Bollywood fans have now been discussing about the pointlessness of Bollywood awards on social networking like Twitter and Facebook. It seems like everyone except award show organizers is aware of this growing criticism. These are Oscars, we have something similar in Bollywood. IIFA (Indian International Film Awards), which came into existence in 2000, is a global Bollywood award show where nominations & winners are selected by peers in the industry. The glossy award function is generally held at an international venue outside India. Nevertheless, they keep honouring the smallest amount of deserved winners. Moreover, they are not far behind when it comes to hilarious categories.
In a nutshell, Bollywood award scene is just a big mess right now. This can be largely related to the fact 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 in order for them to conduct their own award show modelled on Oscars. For the reason that case, a reliable outside agency (an agency named PricewaterhouseCoopers has the responsibility for tabulating Oscar votes) can handle the voting process in order to avoid politics and corruption. Also, it’d force the stars to wait the awards without asking for favours. Such a move could pick up the system. But who’s going to achieve that? The leading actors are at loggerheads all of the time. They fight over everything and their cold wars and camp systems are infamous in Bollywood. Therefore it would be too much to expect them to do something positive about this mess.