GOLD RUSH: CAN WE WIN THE OSCAR RACE?
From our choice of jury to how we lobby in the US, every misstep mars our chances, says filmmaker
ble every year for the Oscar jury as well. In 2017, for instance, the selection of La La Land over Moonlight or Hidden Figures was labelled a racist choice reflecting insular pleasures.
The Academy’s openness to stories of the marginalised has always been questionable. With popular culture becoming more divisive, any attempt to pick one best is necessarily going to be complicated and mostly wrong. Let’s not get fooled by the ‘White Male Lens’ giving us the best!
Should we believe that The Departed was the best of Martin Scorsese, and not The Taxi Driver or Goodfellas? None of us believes that Jai Ho was Gulzarsaab’s or AR Rahman’s best.
Let us be clear that, through the smear campaigns and whisper campaigns, these awards are political.
The reason behind our failure to grab the award is primarily two-fold. Firstly, it is because of our physical / financial inability to reach / tap the pool of Oscar juries for professional lobbying. Lobbying in the unprofessional, unethical and bad sense is prevalent all through our history of domestic film awards. Probably due to this mindset, we have not even tried to understand the American way of lobbying, which is completely legal and integral to the Oscars process.
It is high time we started playing that game professionally! Apparently no
Indian producer could get this part right. I could have been privy to this process when Paheli was the official Indian entry to the Oscars in 2006. However, despite being the director, I was kept completely out of the process.
Secondly, we fail to select correct juries who will then choose an apt Indian entry. Familiarity with world cinema and knowledge of English should be a must; all members ought to be familiar with the latest rules set by the Academy; they need to have clarity as to what should be the norms of judging the representative cinema; they must not have conflict of interest with any film that is in the pool; neither government nor the film industry should interfere in the process of selection.
I have seen how the process gets channelised in an undemocratic way. Originality of content ought to be our unique selling proposition. Though indigenous, the theme ought to have universal appeal.
Let’s hope that Newton embodies all the right ingredients and will fetch the ever-elusive honour to us.
(Amol Palekar is an actor and filmmaker, and was director of Paheli, India’s official entry to the
Oscars in 2006) The first non-Hindi film picked was Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, in 1959. Only one other Bengali film has been picked since — Ray’s Mahanagar (1963).
Nine Tamil films have been India’s official BFLF entries over the years, including Mani Ratnam’s Anjali (1990). The others were Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair; 1988) and Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowarikar; 2001). The first Marathi official entry was Shwaas (Sandeep Sawant; 2004). There have been two more since, Harishchandrachi Factory (Paresh Mokashi; 2009) and Court (Chaitanya Tamhane; 2014). Other languages represented include Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu and Gujarati.