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The agonising controversy over India’s entry for the Oscar foreign film award, Eklavya, has been resolved at last. The Film Federation of India was able to convince the court that the decision was a fair one.
But what it revealed in the process was the ugly battle among the film-makers in India’s largest entertainment industry. What has also emerged is that unless an Indian film wins an Oscar award, there is no salvation for it, something that began with Lagaan in 2001. Naïve film-makers have fallen for the false bait.
This hunt for an Oscar is a post-liberalisation phenomenon, and it is rooted in a confused perception of globalisation.
Call it culture deficit but is there is strange notion that Hollywood stands for quality cinema compared to the domestic fare of popular Hindi cinema. The truth is that Hollywood is as vulgar, popular, sentimental, melodramatic and most of all commercial as mainstream Hindi, Tamil and Telugu cinema.
The chatterati in true philistine fashion continue to blabber that Indian commercial cinema would attain international status if one of its films wins the Oscar, the annual awards given by the American film industry.
Little do our preening critics know that even in the US, the snobbish New York crowd and other discerning ones on the East Coast feel terribly embarrassed by the loud vulgarity of Hollywood, with its studio executives backing safe and popular scripts that churn out stupid and meaningless movies by the dozen and more.
It should be clear to those who claim to know films that Oscars always go to sentimental dramas that tug at heartstrings, especially of the American audiences. As a matter of fact, made-in-Mumbai Hindi commercial films are as bad or as good as Hollywood productions because they tackle the big stories, dreams and emotions that ordinary people experience and imagine.
The difference between Hollywood and Hindi commercial cinema is one of budgets. Earlier, Hollywood had the technology advantage, which is no more the case.
Hollywood is wonderful exactly because it is lowbrow, loud, weepy, violent, romantic.
No one symbolises this more than the legendary Charles Chaplin himself. It is something that makes India’s high brow critics wince because they just cannot bring themselves to accept that Charles Chaplin is at par with good, sentimental stuff of Hindi cinema.
It is the popular Hollywood stuff that draws millions of people into the darkness of movie halls to live their innermost feelings on the big screen. Cultural critics would be justified in pointing out that this vicarious experience of intensity is not very different from the bread-and-circus shows in the last years of decadent Roman empire.
Middle class, English-speaking urban Indians will have to come to terms with their home heritage of popular cinema if they want to maintain a certain amount of normalcy in their worldly outlook.
They have to give up the pretence that Mujh Se Shaadi Karoge is inferior to Maid in Manhattan. All that this small urban class can plead is that since they are not familiar with any Indian language other than English, they love the Hollywood stuff.
It is a legitimate choice, and there is no need to quarrel over that. The trouble arises when it is asserted that Hindi films need to win an Oscar to prove their worth. This is nothing but a silly yearning for American recognition. Those who truly love and admire Hollywood recognize the heart and soul of Mumbai cinema.
Even highbrow filmmakers had their own love affair with Hollywood. When Satyajit Ray acknowledged his cinematic debt to Hollwyood after he received the Lifetime Achievement Oscar, many of his admirers felt let down.
But in the 1940s, Ray was an ardent viewer of Hollywood films though he could hardly be unaware of the inherent and delightful vulgarity of popular American cinema.