Bollywood redux

MARQUEE

Forecasting is always a troublesome business, so here's what amounts to a personal hopelist for the year 2010:

The Big B will appear in not more than two films and four advertisements a year.

The censor board will finally do something useful by restricting the number of guest/friendly appearances an actor is allowed to make annually. Movie titles drawn from the lyrics of old songs will also be disallowed. Bollywood will become less incestuous.

Ram Gopal Varma's Sholay remake will still not have been made. There were just too many problems: after the legal hassles had been dealt with, Varma had to contend with a persistent Dev Anand who insisted on playing Veeru. When rebuffed, Anand promptly announced his own version of the film, with himself and Parikshit Sahni in the lead roles. Meanwhile, Varma secured a casting coup by bringing Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan together for the film "" but tragedy struck when both actors announced they wanted to play Gabbar.

Rani Mukherji and Preity Zinta will have become the first generation of Indian actresses to continue playing lead roles well into their thirties, with no questions raised about marriage or settling down.

There will be at least one leading man in Bollywood who isn't a star son/grandson.

India will finally win its foreign-language film Oscar "" but for a David Dhawan movie that had been widely panned upon its initial release in the country. Govinda will perform a tap-dance with Steve Martin at the Oscar ceremony. The nation will go into mourning.

On the 50th anniversary of the release of Mughal-e-Azam a final, definitive re-restoration will allow viewers to see the film as it was intended to be seen "" in glorious black-and-white.

The MTV-style posturing (together with visual gimmickry used for its own sake) that dominates current Bollywood cinema will be a thing of the past. No more fancy wipes and intrusive sound effects.

Every last VCD will have been wiped off the face of the earth (actually, they don't exist in most countries outside Asia anyway). Indian movie-lovers will finally have understood how vastly superior DVDs are. They will no longer be afraid of simple things like Special Features and Scene Selection. For all this to happen, DVDs will of course have to be made cheaper.

While shooting their movies, Bollywood filmmakers will provide for the extra footage to be included in DVDs (something that's routinely done in the West now) "" like interviews, outtakes and extended scenes. Hopefully, this won't mean they'll neglect the actual movie!

Blogs like Jabberwock (http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com) will be respected sources of information and views on movies.