The show was a sham. It no longer signifies the celebration of real art. I know India is celebrating its achievement and I tried real hard to be a part of it, I really did. I even took the pains to watch it live and I applauded every time Slumdog slammed one home but I confess it wasn’t wholehearted. I felt the awards were patronizing and catered to the current economic and political situation.
A. R. Rahman deserves the ‘Best Original Music Score’ award, no doubt about it. However, the best song could have gone to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrestler’, which for some apparent reason did not even get nominated. That is where I smelt something fishy. Usually there are five nominations for each category and again for some reason there were only three - two from Slumdog Millionaire(SM), one from Wall-E.
All the movies were either ‘Oscar-made’ or uplifting and SM’s use of gory or ‘poverty porn’ as some critics put it, leveraged its position to the general public.
Whatever happened to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? It was by far one of the best movies to be made this year. If I had my way, I would have given it all the awards, except for Best Actor, which would have gone to Mickey Rourke for his brilliant performance in The Wrestler.
So you see the Academy has made the Oscars recession proof. It put on a good show which catered to public opinion and raked in a sizeable moolah from its TV ratings and to top it off, added a new audience (India). Now that is what I call show biz folks!
Business Lesson: Fuck ideals and standards; give the customer what he wants.
Dude i completely agree with you with respect to the show on the whole.., though i cant comment on the best actor award as i havent seen both those films yet.. I wud mention here that last year the show had record low ratings.. i think abt 30 million viewers(generally they have much more) ... thts why i guess they chose Hugh Jackman.. stepping aside from the stand up comedians they generally have... Slumdog was no doubt a good film... but a little too much attention i think... with Britain, US and one other european country tryin to take credit for its success..
ReplyDeleteMate, why all the fuss? coming to think of it the academy was always made of incident bastards! can't believe it? i'll explain. how could they deny Martin Scorsese an Oscar for about 3 decades? Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas were the front runners for 76, 80 and 90 respectively. Yet, he went home empty handed. No fuss was made about that! He did not go on the top his room screaming foul play! And when he had to win it was for "The Departed", a good film, but nothing compared to his previous works. I disagree the "The Dark Knight" deserved all the hounours. Call me Old School, but fantasy films are never ever worth the deal! That's why the whites have the MTV movie awards. Coming to Slumdog and it's success, well sometimes the whites like to be nice to us. The funny part is they know that we're aware of this...remember how we were winning one Miss World after the other? Let them make us feel good. For centuries it's been the other way around. They're just paying back now! Better late than never. So chuck who deserved or not. After all, you and I did not make it to the Kodak Theatre...but someone from our country did, applaud them. Spare the fuss mate!
ReplyDeleteCheers!!!