Oscar Awards: The Indian Dream

“I want to win an Oscar” said Govinda in one of his interviews few years back. He is not the only alone who dreams of winning an Oscar award, considered the ultimate recognition for any movie or an actor.

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The first movie that got nominated to the Oscars from India was Mother India. After that only two movies (Salaam Bombay, Lagaan) got nominated. The nomination of Lagaan almost brought our dream of bringing an Oscar award home true by getting nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film. Too bad that we lost out, but at least it was to a deserving movie like No Man’s Land.

If you are wondering why India has never made it, you might as well look at the list of movies that were nominated over the years. That will give you a fair idea.

Every year the government forms a committee which includes members from the film industry and they then decide which movies will be send to the Oscar. Looking at some of their choices does makes you wonder, what were they thinking. Almost half of them were typical commercial movies which hardly makes any dent in the competitive Best Foreign Language Film category which gets entries from all over the world. Remember the forgettable Ashok Amritaj’s movie “Jeans” was selected to be send as India’s entry to the Oscars. Was this the best we could offer?

Today we have three Indians (A.R. Rehman, Gulzar & Resul Pookutty) nominated for Oscars for the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”. We have surely come a long way to do that. It is only a matter of time that the western world would sit back and take notice of this film industry which churns out the highest number of movies every year.

Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope that this time we wont be disappointed and that Oscars will be making its maiden journey on our land.

Jai Ho!!!