The film awards’season is upon us. It begins every year with the Screen Awards and is usually followed within a fortnight by the Filmfare function. Then comes a series of lesser known shows hosted by assorted publishing houses, competing television channels, gossip rags, manufacturers of beauty products, fly-by-night operators and film agents of dubious repute.

It obviously pays to felicitate denizens of the film world, deserving or not. For merit, as we all know, is the last of all concerns at these shows. What matters is the hype and hoopla accompanying the star turnout, the amount of sponsorship riding on the show and above all, the television eyeballs a programme attracts.

All these factors are closely inter-connected. And towards this end, the organisers and their event managers are known to go to extraordinary lengths at wooing the biggest and brightest of the stars in Bollywood and reward them for their attendance. 

Top heavy

This year, the spoils would predictably be split between Mani Ratnam’s Guru, Shimit Amin’s Chak De! India, R Balkrishnan’s Cheeni Kum, Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par and of course, Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om.

All these films are blockbusters and boast of Bollywood’s biggest crowd-pullers: Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan… Lesser films like Madhur Bhandarkar’s Traffic Signal, Rajat Kapur’s Bheja Fry and Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met would find passing mention, more in the nature of consolation prizes.

But anything smaller, no matter how beautiful or brilliant it might be, does not stand a chance in this annual cherry picking ritual.

Last year, just before the Screen function on January 6, Simi Garewal famously spoke into television cameras, swearing that the awards were not rigged. “As chairperson of the jury in 2006 I can say with absolute authority that the awards are completely honest and truthful,” she declared. “Not a single award is given to an undeserving candidate. I can swear on this!”

The declaration was completely unnecessary as nobody had asked Ms Grewal for a testimonial. But she found it necessary to speak on behalf of the organisers because she, like everybody else in Bollywood, knows that no award ceremony can be above board.

The entire exercise of inviting nominations by popular poll and asking jury members to give their own weightage is an out-and-out sham.

Pulling strings for an award is not as difficult as it might seem. I know this first-hand as I happen to hold a Bollywood award for ‘best writing in cinema’ that I can never be proud of. It started as a joke (and ended as one) with a filmmaker friend one day, bragging about how he had “laid out the fielding” for a particular award he desired for his new film. In good humour, I challenged him to get me an award also, since he claimed to be so influential.

What a bargain!

Now, journalists are rarely recognised, far less rewarded by filmwallahs for what they write. But this man not only got his award but ensured that a special category for film journalism was created that year with a grinning Ismail Darbar, of all the people, handing me the trophy.

Later, I was to discover that the real fixer in this game was a gentleman who masqueraded as an insurance agent for some senior Bollywood stars!

It would surely be unfair to paint all the awards with the same brush. But there are questions that bother me.

Why, for instance, would a Shah Rukh Khan or even a Govinda not be present at a function when his name is not going to pop out of that magic “sealed envelope”? Why would star X agree to dance on stage at one function and star Y refuse to do so?

At another function, why would star Y dance (and of course, be awarded) and the other not even show up? What is the deal, we would all like to know.

An actress like Manisha Koirala who suffers from stage fright, was of no use to awards juries during her hey days.

Likewise, Aamir Khan has for long been ignored despite coming up with sterling performances every year — all because he does not attend awards’ functions.

And then there are the last-minute announcements of special jury and critics awards. Nobody knows whether these ambiguous nominations are the outcome of the organisers’ anxiety to please everyone. Or are they being politically correct? These questions are bound to be raised when the whole exercise is reduced to a Ka-Me Ka-Thee farce. You are obliged to reward those who agree to grace your show.

At times, this spurious logic leads to ludicrous situations. Who does not remember Abhishek Bachchan having to repeatedly make do with the ‘best supporting actor’ award for Yuva in 2005 just because his father was in the running for the “best actor” award for Black? The poor fellow could not protest against his father, but at one function remarked during his thanksgiving speech: “If I was the supporting actor, who was the main actor?”

Making way

Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Akshay Kumar, Sanjay Dutt and many others have had to face such embarrassment in varying degrees because of this policy of appeasement on the part of award-givers. Even Shah Rukh Khan had to make way for the likes of Anil Kapoor and Sunny Deol at the early stages of his career. This is how rumours of awards being “purchased” gain credence.

Significantly, bungling in the technical categories like cinematography, editing, sound design and art direction is minimal because these do not attract public attention. Acting, direction and production (best film award) are regarded as most “prestigious” because of their glamour quotient and accordingly, the popularity of the awards are hinged to them.

Even then, inconsistencies do show up. Time and again, we have seen a certain film cornering all the key awards — from direction to acting, camerawork, sound and editing — but the best production award goes to another film.

This happens at the national level as well. A Malayalam film in the 80s, Chidambaram, had been adjudged the best in all the key departments of filmmaking (including direction, for G Aravindan) which made it automatically eligible for the best film of the year award. But the Golden Lotus went to a Calcutta-based filmmaker simply because the jury could not afford to antagonise the then powerful Bengali lobby.

This politics of appeasement was bound to backfire some day. And it did with the National Awards of 2005 when none other than a jury member took the government to court for being partial towards Black at the cost of some other “more deserving” films.

Clearly, in the absence of a popular poll and with filmmakers having to literally apply for the awards, here, the jury was being influenced. It took a year to resolve the dispute, but by then the government had learnt its lesson.