What do u want to muse today ?
Been a while since I felt the urge to blog fruitfully.. With the Oscars' night just off, it's time I, blasphemously for few, criticised the AMPAS - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - in doling out the "most prestigious" awards to movies deliberately made lavish & extravagantly publicised as magnum opus.. It's hightime the AMPAS looked beyond aesthetical splendour & the unkempt desire to satiate a few million average-joe-movie-goers.. AMPAS was deemed to be the altar of modern cinema, where creativity was valued more than the most-expensive-movie-in-history, & where the adjective "Oscar-winner", or nominee, for that matter, was a metric to embellish the best, while the rest tried keeping up with the incredibles.. Now, in my honest opinion, it's a mere publicity tool, to get the lavishly-made movies to the public.. So, instead of putting their heart & soul & what not into the project, all the crew needs to do, now, is to spend millions, pull in the big names, release under a great banner, perform a-close-to-ordinary artwork & most importantly, release it a few weeks before the Oscars, so that the hype stays alive and keeps the hopes alive, while leaving passionate-movie-goers bone-dead. We, the few creative remnants in the big-is-better-society, never peer into screenings for just the hollow hype. All we, again, the few, if you are still with me, look for is life-size flicks with which one can relate themselves to. Having nothing against terminator-like-flicks, I'm just concerned that the Oscars, at this rate, will fall prey to the hype, thereby losing the hype aound itself. It's only a few more years, in my pedestrian estimate, when action & sci-fi & disenchanting-crap crawl their way unceremoniously into The Ceremony, with the audience applauding the loss of classics, while adulating the arrival of awesomely-catered-yet-awfully-average-plots.
Though am in no position to diagnose yesterday's awardees, for the only reason that I was audience to merely one-and-a-half movie of the entire lot. Ironically, the "half-a-movie" garnered five of the statuettes. I term it "half-a", because of my honest opinion that it wasn't a complete movie at the very least. When I felt that only few Indian directors, with due respect to the scores of Indian greats & thespians, can churn out such incompleteness, Martin Scorsese swoops in, flying right, and well under the thin line separating the best and the rest... The other movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was, artistically, even better, but wasn't even nominated in more than two categories. But, I can't be arguing reasoning with blokes who found Denzel, of "Training Day", a greater piece than his masterpieces. All I could do is thank that he wasn't given the "most-prestigious-statuette" for his "Manchurian Candidate". Who knows, if only "Manchurian Candidate" were made a few years earlier, in place of "Training Day", the gold would've been in Denzel's drawing room, just because the Oscars in 2001 were flavored Afro-American-friendly. That day, World was saved from the most massive self-mockery. Maybe, I'll have to get my eyes & brain replaced with the cast-nickel-alloyed-equivalents at AMPAS, the ones who cast "CAST AWAY" away.
( DISCLAIMER : All opinions stated are mine. If you tend to disagree or find it scathing, it's merely fictitious and coincidental. Oscar Winners ! Revel, Rejoice & Reaffirm your faith in rich monstrousness & Renegade Reality to the Rear. Nominees ( not Losers ) ! be Relieved to Relive Tom Hanks' heart-wrenching moment.)
A movie-goer.
