What Does It Take to Get An Oscar for Best Foreign Film?

What does it take to get a US academy award for the best foreign film? There are a variety of films that get the award, but there does seem to be a fairly easy way to increase a film's chances.

Pick a horrific conflict-ridden zone as a setting for the film. Countries where inhuman massacres take place, especially on a large scale, are a good candidate. Nazi Germany also resonates with the academy. Next, make sure there is a large number of explicitly violent scenes highlighting the helplessness of the victims. The more disturbing the scene, the better. Throw in some young children witnessing the violence for good measure.

Communism and Violence

On the face of it, Communism is a peaceful doctrine. All it says is that people should share resources. Joint ownership of resources, that sounds like a good idea. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't work. Communism may seem like just another way to apportion resources, but its history demonstrates that it is really an inhumanly violent doctrine. (That is because there are no safeguards; the people in power are not responsible to those they rule over.) It inevitably devolves into a violence-when-desired doctrine.

This is evidenced by the excessive violence in all communist regimes so far. Soviet Russia had its share of extreme rulers. Millions were killed, and terror was the performance-motivating factor for most of the U.S.S.R.'s history. China followed much the same route under Mao Ze-Dong during the euphemistically named cultural revolution in the 1960s. In today's media-driven world, China's communist party recognizes that it is folly to be so blatant and have resorted to total indoctrination of the Chinese population to achieve the same aims. Any dissidents (the Falun Gong, for example) are dealt with savagely.

The latest in the line of Marx's descendants to embrace violence and repression wholeheartedly are the Indian communists, the CPI(M). Following in the footsteps of their Soviet and Chinese gods, they have rigged every election in West Bengal (as reported by every English language daily published out of Calcutta after every election) since they came to power in the 1970s. The CPI(M) operates like the Chinese Communist Party, pilfering public funds to pay a huge array of "cadres" operating at a street-by-street level. The recent violence in Nandigram is the latest example of the disregard for ethics of even a basic pretense at humanity demonstrated by the CPI(M), which sent its cadres in to rape and torture villagers who did nothing worse than resist the confiscation of their own land for the CPI(M)'s commercial designs. In typical Communist fashion, saving loss of face became more important than the land and the law and the people.

Classics Massacred

Cinema has a way of bringing some great books to life, while destroying some other classics.

Success stories include the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which, while it's not as good as the original, still made the story accessible in a good way to many people. Two of the failures which bother me -- because I loved the originals -- are Tarzan and Flash Gordon.

Disney's Tarzan is the worst type of destruction, because it fundametally changed the nature of the character. Tarzan was not a wimpy nice-guy. Tarzan was essentially a wild animal with intelligence and a sense of honour. And Tarzan did not skateboard on tree branches.

The other massacre is with Sci-Fi Channel's current series, Flash Gordon, based on the comic strip. The character of Flash Gordon himself is intact, but Zarkov's character is completely destroyed. The original Zarkov was a scientist, true, but he was very far from the sniveling coward in the TV series. He was, if anything, more decisive than Flash, a daring fighter. It is sad to see what the character has been reduced to. Other than this, Ming's original character is much more fearsome than the tame Ming in the TV series. The planet is much less richly realized, although this may be a result of scarce production resources.

China and the Dalai Lama

China seems to lose all sense of proportion and balance when it comes to the Dalai Lama, who was recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bush.

China has "summoned" the US ambassador to convey that ties had been "gravely eroded". Their spokesperson claims that "The move of the United States is a blatant interference in China's internal affairs, hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and has gravely undermined relations between China and the United States."

According to this article:

Liu said Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi summoned US Ambassador to Beijing, Clark Randit and lodged a "solemn protest" for disregarding repeated Chinese requests not to honour the Dalai and prevent senior US leaders from meeting him.

The Chinese government is probably the only entity that fails to realize how ridiculous these claims are. By asking the US to prevent its leaders from meeting the Dalai Lama, it is China that is interfering in the affairs of the US. Before setting about summoning US ambassadors, China would do well to remember that (unlike Russia) it owes 100% of its current prosperity and technology to the US. And the Chinese melodrama about their commie government choosing the next Dalai Lama is the most ridiculous farce ever. By what right do the Chinese commies choose the Dalai Lama, the leader of a religion that stands for the opposite of everything the commies do?

The Reverse Racism Strategy in Cricket

It is well known that Australian cricket uses all the resources at its disposal to advance whatever causes it has. In addition to using the best training available, Australians also use sledging to win matches. Australians also tend to be "forgiven" more easily for on-field confrontations than cricketers from the subcontinent, and are good at being the first to level pre-emptive, or first-strike, accusations of a variety of sorts at everybody. Such allegations include accusations of cheating. Almost all their accusations have proved unfounded.

In the last one year, Australian cricket has started its most ridiculous accusation fad yet. Increasingly, allegations of anti-white racism have begun emerging out of Australia. Darrell Hair was the first to do this. In the fifth India-Australia one-day international in India this year, the Australians began accusations of "racial abuse" by Indian spectators. Both allegations are ridiculous, and the Australian cricket board knows it. That is why both allegations were never acted upon by them... they know such allegations wouldn't survive any sort of scrutiny.

However, the accusations do serve to muddy the waters and set precedents for accusations of anti-white racism. After several years of such accusations, they will become sufficiently well-entrenched to be taken seriously.

The only remedy for such accusations is for cricket bodies to investigate them and expose them for the frivolous sensationalism they are. This would diminish the credibility of the Australian cricket board, forcing them to think twice before throwing such accusations around.

Competition is Good, Even in Indian Cricket

Till recently, the BCCI was an absolute baboo-run dinosaur. BCCI officials, who are richer than most of the players, cared for their jobs even less than the Indian bureaucracy does. BCCI was, and still is, a den of politics, with cricket taking a back seat to the bureaucrats' and politicians' personal agendas. This still continues (as evidenced by the shameful eclipsing of the cricketers at the T20 felicitation at Wankhede by politicians), but the BCCI has got a major jolt in the form of the ICL.

Suddenly, players are being rewarded for their performance (although, as Steve Waugh pointed out, in a way that's harmful for the team spirit). Suddenly, the players' pay has increased, and BCCI is actually trying to improve conditions and opportunities for its players. Bureaucrats and politicians who have been snoring for decades are having to wake up and actually do a good job.

Let's hope the ICL does a great job of developing talent. It's good to give the BCCI a run for its money. Even if ICL doesn't win the war, the competition is bound to force the BCCI to increase its effectiveness.

Telugu Cinema and Maturity

Something has been wrong with Telugu cinema for a while. A long time ago, especially during the black-and-white era, the films used to be great. The acting was theatrical rather than realistic in those days, but the stories were good and the films were coherent. Sometime in the 70s or 80s, films in the Telugu industry took a turn for the worse. To be fair, this happened to all Indian films... late 80s Hindi films are often unwatchable. But around the end of the 90s, Bollywood began redeeming itself. Most of the films are still incoherent and meaningless, but they began making a few really good ones.

The Telugu industry still seems stuck in the 80s mold of incoherent, shark-jumping plots, gratuitous violence, and songs that are jarringly out of place. Instead of improving, the Telugu industry seems to be getting worse. The violence is more mindless, the plagiarism and stitching together of individual scenes from Hindi and Hollywood films has reached a point where some films feel like incoherent patchwork, and even the Telugu language is being massacred in many of the recent ones. The Telugu industry has also not realized the importance of theme music in a film (i.e. the background score, not the songs).

Examples of this include Pokiri, which is full of unrealistic and meaningless violence. Maaya Bazaar, a recent film (not related to the original), is a movie with a decent idea but is poorly directed, full of maudlin sermonizing and silly fight scenes. Aite is a recent film with a good idea but ordinary execution and very poorly spoken Telugu. Gajani is a rip-off of the Hollywood movie Memento, but is poorly executed and seems a little irrelevant in the Indian situation.

Perhaps it is silly to blame the industry, which is simply producing what the people want. But I believe it must be possible to make a popular film that is also good from a theoretical, critical viewpoint. Bollywood has done it, and the Tamil industry is following suit. That Telugu cinema can do it is evidenced by the large number of excellent movies produced in the past, and the occasional blips of excellence like Godavari. It is time Telugu cinema pulled itself out of the 1980s morass.