Shekhar Stirred

Like many other Indians, I had mixed feelings on February 10th as I read the Oscar nominations for 1998. Shekhar Kapur8217;s Elizabeth had earned seven nominations, but while the producers of the film had been nominated for Best Film, he himself had not been nominated for Directing. As I scanned that list, my heart sank even more as I read the names of the nominees. What unbelievable company it would have been! Roberto Benigni, the brilliant Italian comic and star of such films as Johnny Stickino, Down By Law and Night on Earth was one of them. Terence Mallick, the eccentric genius who had retired from moviemaking in 1978 after making Badlands the acknowledged inspiration for Natural Born Killers and the visually ground-breaking love story Days of Heaven, had delivered The Thin Red Line with the best possible results. Steven Spielberg- the name is iconic enough to warrant no description. And one of my personal favourites, Peter Weir, the Australian director of a number of seminal films of my teenageyears, including Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipolli, and Witness, had returned to form with the unconventional, startling The Truman Show.

Just to have been nominated among this present list of directors would have been award enough. I found myself secretly scratching out John Madden8217;s name, the director of Shakespeare in Love for no fault of his own, just since I don8217;t know any of his work, and filling in Shekhar8217;s instead.I guess what made it hard to digest was that Shekhar was the only one whose film was nominated for Best Film, who didn8217;t get the corresponding nomination for Best Director. What made it harder was that the man who edged him out was Peter Weir, a god-like director in my eyes. I started wondering about how a Best Film could logically be made by one other than a Best Director, or a Best Director could have made something that was not a Best Film. As I went back over the Oscar years, and found a few in which the winners in both these categories were different. In 1989 Driving Miss Daisywon for Best Film, but Oliver Stone was awarded best director for Born on the Fourth of July. In 1981 the Academy awarded Chariots of Fire the Best Film, but Warren Beatty took home the award for Directing for Reds. And way back in 1972, I was surprised to find that though the Best Film was The Godfather, it was not Francis Ford Coppola, but Bob Fosse who won for Directing with Cabaret.

It makes no sense to me-a director is the one whose vision shapes the film, from the scripting stage right upto the way it looks when we see it in the cinema. If that film is adjudged to be the best, how can anyone other than that director be awarded in that category? Is it some notion of a handicap, that a director took a mediocre script or project somehow BEYOND its potential? In the converse way, over here directors of Aamir Khan8217;s films get less credit than their peers, the conventional thinking being that having such an involved talent somehow diminishes their contribution to the film.

I guess these discrepanciesultimately reflect a couple of ground realities that we usually gloss over.

As institutional as the awards are, they are ultimately the opinion of a small community of Academy members. And all over the world, given the intensely political nature of film communities, the awards are merely the representations of these political machinations. To assume that it is any more than that is like assuming that legislation in Parliament is the result of people acting in the interest of the nation.

And secondly, the notion of these awards itself is highly superficial. If these awards were a measure of commercial success, an objective set of measures can determine the winners. But in as much as these awards are a notice of merit, and non-commercial, it is impossible to objectively evaluate films, let alone more subjective awards such asthose for acting, screenwriting and music scoring.

Can you imagine Marlowe8217;s Doctor Faustus beating out Macbeth in the late 16th century8217;s stage version of the Oscars? It is hard to,but if it had been so, there could have been at least one good side-effect: a disillusioned Shakespeare may never have been in love, and instead his monarch Elizabeth could have picked up an eighth nomination.