bollywood award functions - are they ??

Award functions today have became an essential part of our film and television industry. it has become a means for the film fraternity to come together and get to know the latest happenings. It is also a platform to give recognition to individuals for their hard work.
But there are certain flaws in our award functions.

Initially there used to be only one – filmfare. But now we have so many different award functions: iifa, screen, zee to name a few. This has raised a serious concern over the quality of any single award function. Each one has a prominent sponsor like manikchand, Samsung, sansui, etc. It is like each television channel should have one. If you look at the Hollywood award function – Oscars, you will observe that it may have sponsors but not anyone which will share space with banners.

Our award functions have only one thing to show – ‘song and dance’ sequences. There is nothing else that they can do. Occasionally we have some troupe from Russia or Africa that will perform some acrobats but that’s all. A few antics from some action heroes, mimicry from the leading comedians, a few songs by some leading singer are the deviations that are possible.

Why do you never see Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgan and few others at any bollywood award function? The reason is very simple. They don’t believe in our award functions because they feel it doesn’t award merit but lobbying. And this lobbying is prevalent everywhere.

If we observe carefully, we notice that awards are never given for academic or technical performance. Instead the criteria is the popularity of the cast, performance at the box office and how much power the producers have in the film industry. No doubt why films like ‘Main hoon na’, ‘veer zaara’ got so many awards at all functions whereas films like ‘Swades’, ‘Lakshya’ and the like hardly got any recognition. This happens despite the fact that they were better technically (and for me in viewing as well) than the former.

If this is not enough, we also have specially made awards for some of our biggest stars.
E.g. Hrithik Roshan got an ‘Extraordinary debut’ award at filmfare, Shahrukh gets a technical jury award if he doesn’t get one in the popular category. All this is just to keep them happy.

Finally our award functions are too gaudy. The setup and the overall look of the award function are strictly OK. There is absolutely no theme and idea. The hosts are as confused and don’t know what to speak. They have their pathetic jokes which bore everyone. The recipients have nothing else to say except for a long list of ‘thank you’. A glance at the front seats shows fake and plastic smiles of the various artistes.

I wrote this article because the award function that took place at Amsterdam (IIFA) had all the above ingredients. I hope they improve in the future if they want to compete with the Oscars.