Year-end Awards for Bollywood 2011

The Cult Classic Award: Haunted 3D. If there is anything 2011 will be remembered for, besides the revelation of public loot on an epic scale, it will be the premise of a movie that sends Mimoh Chakraborty aka Mahakshay, in full glorious 3D, back through the dimension of time to rescue the comely Meera (Tia Bajpai), trapped inside a maelstrom of button-popping lust by her demented music-teacher Mr Iyer, a libertine artist who paints “ashleel tasweerein” and concentrates more on the hapless heroine’s D majors than musical B flats.

Intensely scary and never more so than when the hero starts doing a break dance with the horny spirit in full cry, Haunted 3D is the type of celluloid greatness that can make anyone, even those whose nerves have ice water flowing through them, wake up at 3am in the night and shout in a voice cracking with fear, in the way the character played by Mimoh challenges the ghost, “Iyer Iyer Iyer”.

The Desperately Original Award: Chitkabrey. The film had the following gems: Bhojpuri superstar Ravi Kishen with balloons tied to his choti while his trousers are pulled down, a woman fellating on an ice-cream bar, and classic pick-up lines like “Sab kuch perfect hai… unchai, golai aur gaherayee”. If there is something that Bollywood sometimes gets a bad rap for, it is lack of originality. Not so in the case of Chitkabrey. A message film that highlights the evils of ragging and sleeping with one’s homosexual boss and other assorted acts of sexual kinkiness, it was, like most avant-garde works of art, destined to stay off the commercial mainstream but gave people like me, who appreciate the surreal Dadaism of nonsensical narratives, much to
applaud about.

The Khatarnak Debut Award: Nargis Fakhri. Pakistan has this tendency to name their missiles after those foreigners who laid to waste India — Ghazni, Babur and Ghauri. They should name the next one Fakhri in honour of this formidable lady who has, with her cut-and-burn performance in Rockstar, made us realise what pain truly is, the kind of pain that produces a “rockstar”. It takes something to take Katrina Kaif down from her position as India’s number 1 imported non-actress. And this girl has done just that.

The Worst Labelled Movie Award: Aarakshan. At least when Madhur Bhandarkar calls his film Jail, it is actually about a jail. However Prakash Jha’s film was as much about reservations in education as it was about Saif Ali Khan’s robust moustache. For honesty in naming, the director of once-powerful movies like Gangaajal had only to look at another release of 2011— F.A.L.T.U.

The Worst Promoted Movie Award: Ra.One. When you see one rival (The ‘Deerhunter’) make one superhit after another (Ready, Bodyguard), none of which possess a semblance of a plot, narrative, characterisation or originality, and another one (The ‘Intellectual’) promote a movie that has the most trite kind of potty humor as a pathbreaking one (Delhi Belly),  it might seem that the world is out to get you when they give these guys a pass and complain that your movie that shows Karva Chauth and Dusshera in the wrong order, does not have any logic or internal consistency, corrupts children, and promotes obnoxious regional stereotypes. But when your strategy consists of a shock-and-awe, heavy-handed promotion campaign that consists of jamming every bit of media bandwidth with the single-minded devotion as the DD mandarins of the ’80s, who hammered the country with a daily diary of every minister’s ribbon-cutting activities, a backlash is inevitable. In an age when movies are primarily products, and promotions their lifeblood, this is one cautionary tale which proves that Oscar Wilde’s dictum of “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess” is not always true.

Arnab Ray is the author of the best-selling May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss.