Review of the STAR Parivar awards ceremony

The awards ceremony conducted by STAR group to honour their favourite actors and actresses on STAR Plus was shown on Sunday, 20th May 2007. Since I had nothing to do, I decided to watch the show and see how the different soaps and programs on STAR Plus compare against each other.

This particular award show is a medium to gauge the popularity of various shows and the characters in those soaps. I was particularly pleased with many of the winners this year. The reason I will tell you a little later. Before that I will quickly tell you how the show went.

The hosts these year were the comperes of the show Nach Baliye on STAR One. i.e Sangita Ghosh and Shabbir Ahluwalia. Joining them in the party was Varun Badola. These three together made a mockery of many of the shows in the channel through ballads and mimickry. It was quite funny and entertaining. However. I wasnt happy with the mandatory dance performances provided by some of the stars of the channels. Prerna aka Shweta Tiwari of Kasauti was pathetic. She seems to have put on weight as was visible from her dress. She dances better than many of the stars on TVs these days but yesterday was a bad day for her. Hussain as always is the Hrithik Roshan of TV. He is one of the best dancers on TV right now and Juhi aka Kumkum could not match her at all. The rest of the dances were also nothing to note about.

Now for the awards. Till the past few years, these awards are actually a medium for thanking Ekta Kapoor for making people famous and rich. But this year was different. The traditional favourites: KSBKBT, Kahani, Kasauti and the other K serials could not win many. This is an important warning signal to Ekta to quickly improve the content of her many soaps. Many of the awards that the K-camp won was primarily because of their old stars and not because of their new additions. It says a lot about user preferences: Good solid content is what matters these days, not the same old sauten, saas and bahu stories.

The surprising (and positively) pack of the ceremony was the two serials which come on weekends: Prithviraj Chauhan and Ba, Bahu and Baby. Both of them together won 8 awards in total. BBB grabbed the pole position with 5 awards and Pritvi with 3 awards. I am very pleased with this because these are the only two shows that I watch on STAR Plus because of their fresh approach and good content. Both these serials have excellent performances from their actors and crisp story line. BBB has brilliant performances from almost everyone (notably the children, Gattu, Baby, Pravin, Arvind...well I think the entire cast needs to be mentioned). Prithviraj Chauhan has really good performances from the lead star cast (the child Prithvi is simply amazing) and very good action sequences. Special mention here for the Sagar brothers. While Ramanand Sagar may be respected and considered good, his serials like Krishna had become very boring. Their cast used to overact and had lots of make up. Now the younger Sagar brothers have brought a new freshness to historical dramas.

I feel even more pleased since I feel vindicated by the awards given to these two serials. I can justify that I am actually watching good content on TV and not whiling away my time. Further they have beaten the traditional heavyweights, the K-Serials and that has pleased me the most.