For films that should never have been made, there’s the Raspberry awards. For inventions that should never ever be attempted, there’s the Ig Nobel awards. To outsmart the ‘videsis’, our ‘desi’ bhai log at Filmfare decided to hand out awards to real life heroes and heroines of 2007. Here are the winners who shaked things up in the Year of the Pig.
Over to the winners.
Best singer: Goes to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for singing Sonia’s tunes ever since he assumed office and not getting tired of his nightingale act. Many speculated that his throaty marathon will not last long. But when victory is so-nia, should anyone give up hope? Atleast he never did and therefore the award.
Best dance director: Given jointly to the CPI and CPI (M) for getting the Congress to dance to its mellifluous leftist tunes on the US nuclear deal. In fact, the Manmohan Singh government came to power after they vouched to sign a paper that read something like this: ‘Have Left, will dance’. Ofcourse, some Congress stalwarts said they were too old to be perpetually on left-hand drive, but they were outnumbered by the others who declared that dance was the pivot around which Indian politics does a tub-thumping rhumba.
Best action director: Goes to the MD of Delhi’s Blueline buses for his troupe’s deathly stunts that left more than 100 people dead and many more injured in 2007 and got the media baying for his blood. Nothing succeeds like excess, and only Blueline showed us how.
Best film: To actor Amitabh Bachchan who turned writer, producer and director with this film. Titled ‘Do Bigha Zameen’, it chronicles the life and times of a superstar who gets embroiled in a real estate controversy in Uttar Pradesh. The problem? Only farmers are allowed to own land in a village called Daulatpur, but he wasn’t one. The rest of the film details his defences against all the accusations and how he finally had to hand over the illegally acquired land back to the government. The best part of the film is its ending, where the district attorney asks, “Before he ‘returns’ the land to us, he needs to first prove that he is indeed the rightful owner”. This clearly brings the story back to where it started, and the film ends abruptly with the line, ‘And the argument continues’. A cinematic victory no less.
Best producer: To Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. The number of half-truths that he has manufactured far outnumbers those by the most compulsive of liars. And the best part? Five years after his government-sponsored genocide, he milked his 2002 production again this year to reinforce his image as a daring CM with Tehelka’s video expose that proves he indeed engineered the Gujarat riots. However, he’s still one unhappy producer despite the Filmfare award. He is cribbing that the media outburst after the Tehelka expose only lasted a month. He was hoping it would continue till the Gujarat elections in December that could have helped him at the hustings because he knows public memory is short.
Best villain: To Salman Khan for walking free after killing an endangered species – this doesn’t even happen in films these days. By this act, he beat his close competitor Sanjay Dutt who had to do jail time for merely possessing an AK 47. Khan wins the award hands down for getting away with murder.
Best director: To Ram Gopal Varma for re-casting a hero (Amitabh Bachchan) from the blockbuster film ‘Sholay’ as the villain in the remake of the same film. It was a director’s coup allright. That the film opened to empty houses is a moot point. That the film was successfully completed gets him major brownie points. Congrats, RGV.
Best actor: To Janata Dal supremo HD Deve Gowda for taking politics to a new low with his high octane act of deception. He threw out his son from the party because he formed a coup and threw out the Congress from power by aligning with a non-secular BJP. A few days into the regime, and Gowda takes back his son into the party and remote controlled his chief ministership for the next 19 months. When his son’s tenure ended, and it was time for a BJP candidate to assume office, Gowda gets his son to pull the rug from under the BJP’s lotus feet. Nobody understands opportunistic politics better than Gowda. Which is why this award.
Best actress: To the MD of Bombay stock exchange. Women are known for their unpredictable nature and nothing exemplifies this more than the sensex. Just when things started looking up, crores of money gets shaved off investor’s kitty. And just when things appeared to be hitting rock bottom, stock prices would shoot northwards with a speed never recorded in its history. It even came smelling distance of touching 20,000 points… but like the lady it is… screeched to a halt at 19198 and then nosedived more than a thousand points the next day. Sensex has this remarkable ability of making you happy and sad within a fraction of a second. Never seen a more accomplished actress in a long time.
