Oscar, meet Joel and Ethan

MARQUEE

It's always interesting to see how different people in India perceive the Oscars. For casual moviegoers, it can seem like a very impressive, high-falutin event, because most of the movies that walk off with the top awards remain distantly heard-of names, never to be seen at the local multiplex.

For the informed buff, however, the awards ceremony is decidedly middlebrow because of the mostly safe choices it makes (genuinely edgy, or controversial films are usually given the go-by), and because of the laughably transparent efforts to strike just the right balance between Serious Cinema and out-and-out commercial films "" which results in the regular doling out of statuettes to over-earnest "message movies" that will soon fade into obscurity.

For almost all of its history, the award selections have had more to do with factors like sentimentality (90-year-old veteran actor phoned in a supporting actor performance from his deathbed? Throw him a little naked golden man!) and topicality (righteous liberal film about the evils of American imperialism?

Best Picture, so what if it has no script) than with actual merit (which is subjective anyway, so what the heck). But until a few years ago, you could at least say this about the Oscar ceremony: it used to be entertaining. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

In the last three or four years, I've been astonished at how the show keeps finding new ways to become dull and colourless (while, equally astonishingly, some of the movie-awards shows back home seem to have developed a minor sense of humour). The weepy, self-congratulatory, politically correct tone of the event has risen to new depths, as Alfred E Newman would say.

Which is why I derived some solace last week not just from the awarding of major Oscars to two of my favourite filmmakers, the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, but also from their attitude to the ceremony. No bear-hugs every time their names were announced, no crying noisily onstage and proclaiming that this win had been especially designed by god as part of a grand scheme.

All they had to offer was a resigned "ya, well" expression as they trotted up on stage to collect their three awards for No Country for Old Men. And some very tongue-in-cheek humour that, gratifyingly, very few people in the audience seemed to get.

After they won the trophy for best adapted screenplay (the film was based on a Cormac McCarthy novel), Joel Coen quipped, "We're very selective "" we've only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy so far."

This was a nice dig at the boo-boo made by the Motion Picture Academy a few years ago when it nominated the Coens in the best adapted (rather than original) screenplay category for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, only very loosely based on Homer's The Odyssey. (As a goof-up, this was comparable to the awarding of the screenplay Oscar to George Bernard Shaw for the film version of Pygmalion in 1939, 25 years after he had written the play.)

At any rate, the Coens (and their whimsical movies, which usually defy classification) are such non-Oscar types that it gave me a perverse pleasure just seeing them on stage; they seemed to have traipsed in from a universe parallel to the one inhabited by the regular lot of Hollywood penguins.

George C Scott once described the Oscars as a meat parade, but the meat has been stale and leathery of late. Last week, very briefly, the Coens added some josh to the roghan.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)