Mar 25, 2002 09:42 PM
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(Updated Mar 25, 2002 09:46 PM)
The 74th Academy Awards (aka Oscar Awards) night has come and gone and so has one more entry from the Indian movie industry, making a vain bid for the best foreign film award.
After the six-month suspense and wait, this years Oscar Award for the Best Foreign Language Film has been announced and Lagaan is not its recipient. The fear of many Indians that Lagaan would fail to impress the Awards jury to reward it with an Oscar, has come true. This decision of the jury is not surprising.
It is an accepted fact that average Americans do not have a good knowledge of world geography and may have little awareness of India as country. Thus, the Oscar Awards jury, as a representative of the American population, should be pardoned for not knowing the origin country, India, of a movie called Lagaan. If this was the case of geography and its influence on the Oscar Awards in the foreign films category, the case of history might not have been better! The Oscar Awards jury probably had low or no knowledge in Lagaan as a tale from 19th century India, when the British ruled India. It is a trifle too much to expect an American jury to appreciate, Lagaan, a movie from an unknown land called India. Without knowing the historical background of India, it would not have been possible to understand and admire Lagaan, let alone award it.
If history and geography played spoilsport in Lagaan?s attempt at the Oscars, American sport itself had probably the most to do with Lagaan?s ultimate failure to clinch an Oscar. It was highly improbable that an Indian movie with a cricket game, a game unknown to most Americans, as its plot, would win the Oscar and the results have shown this. The game of cricket is played by a microscopic minority in the USA and is definitely not a popular American sport. The nearly one hour climactic cricket scene may have been the last nail to do in Lagaan, with the American jury either being completely bored by it or may even have been put to sleep.
There is hope though for Aamir Khan. He could still make a bid for Oscars in the future, but after having funded college education programmes in the USA that would teach the history and geography of India to American college students. He could then make a movie of an American football team visiting India and the teaching that game to Indians. Aamir can then have made a more sure bid for an Oscar for a movie from India ? by making a movie in and from a country known to Americans and more importantly on a game they know, like and adore ? American football.
Good Luck Aamir!
