And the Oscar goes to

HOLLYWOOD REEL

Are the Oscars irrelevant for India? Not quite.

"We don't care for an Oscar "� who are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award or recognise Indian film makers," a young Indian film maker burst out at an Open Forum session at the 35th International Film Festival of India in Goa.

He was not alone and he had a point. There are many in Indian filmdom who believe that the Oscars are not relevant to India and are not the ultimate film awards on earth.

Unlike the Nobel Prize, the Olympics and the international film festival juries, the Oscars are determined by the sensibilities of just the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The organisation only has a select group of Indians as members.

The first stage in selecting Oscar winners is narrowing all the possible honorees in a given year down to five nominees for each award category.

To be eligible for nominations in any of the feature film categories, a movie must be more than 40 minutes long and should have had a public premiere at a movie theater, during the appropriate calendar year.

Additionally the film must have played in an Los Angeles County theater, for paid admission, for seven consecutive days, that year. For most of the award categories, only Academy members in that particular field are allowed to vote for nominees (that is, only directors submit nominations for the best director).

Foreign film and documentary nominees are chosen by special screening groups made up of Academy members from all branches, and everybody gets to select best picture nominees.

Foreign film nominees are selected from a list of films submitted by foreign nations and each country can only submit one film a year. It's for this reason several critics in Hollywood have argued that the Academy has failed to recognise the globalisation of quality film making.

In the history of Oscars there is no mention of Indian film makers, including Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor or even Ritwik Ghatak, besides our actors and technical talent.

It is surprising that the Academy has also completely ignored home grown Hollywood film makers like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, besides never awarding Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

India has already produced two Oscar winners and three Oscar-nominated feature films. Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray was awarded a special lifetime achievement Oscar and Bhanu Athaiya was awarded in the Best Costume category for "Gandhi".

"Mother India", "Salaam Bombay" and "Lagaan" were nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category. India born film maker Ismail Merchant too had a short film "The Creation of Woman" nominated for the Oscars in 1960.

Two Indian films, "The House that Ananda built" by Fali Bilimoria (1968) and "An Encounter with Faces" by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (1978), both produced by films division, were nominated in the Documentary Film category.

There was an Indian connection at the Academy awards this year. The Oscar winning documentary "Born Into Brothels" was shot entirely on location in Kolkata and the South African foreign language contender "Yesterday" was produced by Anant Singh, a non resident Indian.

Also hiding behind the Oscar mania this year was "The Little Terrorist" by Delhi- based film maker Ashvin Kumar which was nominated in the Best Live Action Short category. The 15-minute short film may not have won the award but it got the much deserving theatrical release in India last month.

Ashvin Kumar says: "While the Oscar nomination is the catalyst, the release of my film is no doubt fuelled by the 'multiplex' boom in the country."

The film played in select cinemas before current feature films. Having planned 10 prints for the whole country, Shringar Films, the distributors, managed to book 10 prints in Mumbai itself with an additional two in Pune.

They also did deals with theatres in Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai and were looking at cities in Gujarat and Rajasthan (the film being in the Rajasthani language). The Indian distributors are now experimenting to see whether a revenue model can be developed out of playing shorts ahead of feature films.

Ashvin Kumar adds: "I sincerely hope it works.. I'd like to see a time when shorts, as in the West, become a rites of passage for every aspiring film maker here in India."

The Oscars are a currency understood in Hollywood and international markets. Beyond the hype and publicity of the award is a serious commercial proposition. An award or a nomination opens newer markets for films, as also larger budgets for the film maker's next venture. It also provides access to international funds, studio distribution deals and representation by talent agencies.

Winning a nomination for an Oscar has already had financial and distribution implications for film makers like Ashutosh Gowariker and Ashwin Kumar. The Oscars may or may not be the ultimate prize but it is certainly very high on the list of things to have for a film maker looking beyond Indian audiences.

Bhuvan Lall is the president and CEO of LALL Entertainment, a company based in Los Angeles and New Delhi. He can be contacted at lallentertainment@hotmail.com