Awards [Live]

It’s that time of the year. When temperatures dip, vacations happen, and connoisseurs of the world gather to judge the best and worst of the year gone by. The international movie awards season is upon us, and soon there will be a deluge of nominees and winners – the BAFTAs, the SAGs, the Golden Globes, and finally, just when you think you can’t bear to see another red carpet, the Oscars. There’ll be hype, there’ll be hoopla and there’ll be controversy. But before all that, there will be hotly debated lists of contenders.

So who are the frontrunners for Best Picture this season? While a lot of movies aimed at the awards season release in December, most are previewed at festivals earlier in the year. So there’s already a pretty good sense for the movies in contention this year. As always, it’s a mix of festival favorites and critically acclaimed mainstream movies.

Remember Inception? It was touted to be the movie of the year till The Social Network came along. Both told rather untellable stories – one a sci-fi tale about corporate espionage in the world of dreams, the other a real-life inspired tale of the geeky beginnings of the Facebook phenomenon. Both were executed with incredible skill and received with enthusiasm by critics and audiences worldwide. Both are strong mainstream contenders for Best Picture. Toy Story 3 is another mainstream success that might possibly become the first animation feature to get nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year.

Among the festival favorites, there’s Colin Firth’s The King’s Speech – a period comedy-drama set during the Second World War, based on the real life story of the King of England who was crippled by his stammer at a time when his nation needed to hear the calm voice of its leader. The film just won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is slowly gathering steam just in time for the biggies. Another much talked about movie is Darren Aronofsky’s psychological drama, Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman. Danny Boyle is back in contention too, with his 127 Hours starring James Franco, based on the true story of an intrepid climber who survived five days trapped under a boulder in Robbers Roost, Utah. Other names being thrown around are Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right and Matt Reeves’ Let Me In.

In the super competitive foreign film category, there’s Alejandro González Iñárritu’s much acclaimed Mexican film, Biutiful, for which Javier Bardem won best actor at Cannes this year. There’s the winner of the Cannes Palmes D’Or from Thailand, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Other contenders include Semih Kaplanoglu's Bal (Turkey), Igor Sterk's 9:06 (Slovenia) and Javier Fuentes-León's Undertow (Peru) – all winners in the festival circuit. And then there’s Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] – the third Aamir Khan production to make it as India’s official entry to the Oscars. Lagaan got close with an Oscar nomination back in 2002, and before that Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India were the only other Indian films that made the cut. With Aamir at the helm, Peepli [Live] has been promoted better than most of India’s past entries – it duly did the festival rounds, got in front of several foreign reviewers and managed to make waves. It faces tough competition, but we’ll cross our fingers anyhow.

No talk of the awards season can be complete without that ode to the best of the worst – the annual Raspberry awards. The Razzies restore balance to the world. They are the Yin to the Oscars’ Yang. Announced a week before the Oscars, they burst the self-important, self-congratulatory bubble that envelopes the awards season each year. Some of this year’s contenders - Sex And The City 2, The Bounty Hunter, Remember Me, Valentine’s Day, From Paris With Love, The Last Airbender, Clash Of The Titans – each sounds horrendous in its own right. May the worst film win.

Movie awards are never just about cinematic achievement. There are usually political, social, even historical dimensions to the selection criteria that warp a purely cinematic order of merit (if there can even be such a thing, but that’s a whole other discussion). Last year’s battle of Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker was telling. As was the Slumdog Millionaire sweep the year before. It’s subjective territory anyway – at best a celebration of a fraternity’s work, at worst an eyeball-garnering commercial opportunity. The reality lies somewhere in between, and as long as they’re orchestrated right, the awards make for a good excuse to discover and re-discover some great movies.

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wrote this for channel6, hyderabad.