and the award goes to

come february and there is a very high probability that when you switch on the idiot box, you will be watching a movie awards night and will get bored to death hearing this line (title of the post) spoken repeatedly on the show.. you have the golden globe and oscar awards representing hollywood but our very own bollywood beats them hands down when it comes to hosting award shows (at least in the number).. till the 80s (or the early 90s, i am not sure), we had the much revered filmfare awards as the one and only way to recognise & reward the talent in hindi movies.. now we have a plethora of them, looks to me that every entertainment magazine & channel has one award going by its name (after all who wants to lag behind in this world of fierce competition).. so to add to the oldie filmfare, we now have stardust award, zee cine award and very likely sony award, star gold award etc etc..

another dauting task that bollywood has successfully completed is spreading their popularity globally.. so apart from these multitude of award shows hosted in mumbai, we now have the iifa awards hosted in some exotic land outside india (dubai in 2006, yorkshire in 2007).. presence of former miss world aishwarya "sunehri" rai at the cannes film festival also drew the attention of hollywood to the glam quotient (read "vague dressing sense" in her case) of bollywood.. pardon me for digressing here but since this was a golden moment in the history of our country, i would like to inform that aishwarya recently married abhishek bachchan (who got dozens of "gillette mach 3" as wedding gift), if you were not aware of this then it shows that neither you read newspaper nor you watch tv and should kill yourself.. coming back to the topic, how can we ignore the contribution of aamir "ace" khan who did the uphill task of taking bollywood to oscars by earning the best foreign language film nomination for lagaan (a task last achieved by mira nair for the movie Salaam Bombay some 15 years before him).. such was his dedication for bringing glory to bollywood, that an actor who had earlier renounced bollywood awards (declining to receive the best actor award for Raja Hindustani) by saying that they were below standard (or something similar) did everything possible to win the coveted oscar, only to lose the final match to No Man's Land..

but he did show his patriortism for the country by this act (after all there was no personal interest in promoting lagaan on the streets of america..) which he later repeated with all fervour by jumping to the rescue of Narmada Bachao Andolan (complete lack of knowledge over the issue was quite clear from his tv interviews at that time) while painting everything yellow, thanks to his superhit movie Rang De Basanti.. our countrymen, suddenly woken from their slumber by this movie, simply couldn't stop appreciating this "fighting for a cause" attitude of his and forgot to pay any attention to mrs. kavita gadgil (mother of late flight lt. ajay gadgil who died in a MiG crash and was the inspiration behind the character of Madhavan in RDB) who didn't receive the fair credit from the makers of RDB for parting with the story of her son for the movie.. after reading this i felt quite bad for appreciating a movie which has been playing with public emotions in such a way..

i return to the topic under discussion and now try to focus on the quality of the awards.. ok, so these awards are considered to be the battle between the best in the year and so when your pick loses, you feel bad but console yourself that it lost to a better pick.. the kind of emotion you feel when shawshank redemption loses all its 7 nominations to equally good if not better classics like forrest gump.. but here in bollywood, we have hrithik roshan winning the best actor filmfare award for Dhoom-2, you feel disappointed (after initially wondering if hrithik was the hero or the villain of the movie) that the award didn't go to sanjay dutt for munnabhai (if hrithik was hero) or saif ali khan for omkara (if hrithik was villain) but then realize and feel happy that at least hrithik didn't win it for Kkrish.. another saving grace was that aishwarya didn't win the best actress award for dhoom-2, had there been award like best acting in a sporting role she would surely have won it for her basketball dribbling stunts in the movie :)

all this reminds you that indeed these are meant to be popular awards given on the basis of popularity of a particular movie/actor, sometimes bad things can be more popular than the good ones and assuming this you can console your heart that may be dhoom-2 won it for all the wrong reasons.. may be movies like dhoom-2, kkrish, kabhi alvida na kehna were so bad that they overshadowed the better movies of the year by being more popular of the lot and grabbing the majority of trophies.. i also wonder that when they can have critics awards for best movie/actor/actrees primarily to please the egoes of those who failed to win the main award, why can't they introduce more awards to appreciate more realistic cinema like Dor, Khosla Ka Ghosla which were given a blind eye by the juries in the main categories.. may be in a way, we the viewers are also responsible for this, since we flock the multiplexes for utterly meaningless movies thereby making them a commercial hit while giving a pass to the so called low-profile but meaningful cinema..

btw Hrithik did win the best actor award for Kkrish, it was zee cine award !!

disclaimer : author would like to add that the views expressed above are his own and are not intended to hurt the fans of aamir khan, aishwarya rai, hrithik roshan, abhishek bachchan, dhoom-2, kkrish..