Indian Movies At Oscars - Case Studies

In the previous articles we have discussed the Expectations, Causes of Failure and the Importance of Oscars. This post covers a few case studies, which could not make a successful performance at the Oscars in the past.

Mother India (1957)

Produced and Directed by Mehboob Khan, Mother India is perhaps the ultimate tribute to womanhood. Why Mother India couldn't make it at the Oscars -

• The length of the movie
• Apartheid was on a high during that time, which might have been another cause of failure

Salaam Bombay! (1988)

Produced and Directed by Mira Nair, Salaam Bombay chronicles the day-to-day life of children living on the streets of Mumbai. All the children acting in the movie were real street children, given proper training for the movie. Why Salaam Bombay! couldn't make it at the Oscars -

• The cast was totally unknown
• The movie was not properly marketed, especially in India, which retarded it's promotion in the Oscars

Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India (2001)

Produced by Aamir Khan and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, Lagaan is probably one of India's finest movie, mixing the British rule with Cricket. Though it was a splendid movie, it lost to “No Man’s Land”, dealing with two wounded soldiers caught in the no man’s land. Why Lagaan couldn't make it at the Oscars -

• The movie was taken at a time when the British ruled India; the movie had nothing to do with the present times, which became a important cause of its failure

Rang De Basanti (2006)

Though this movie was not even nominated to the Oscars, let us even consider why it could not succeed. Produced and Directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehta, Rang De Basanti is one of the movies, which inspired the youth of the country to a large extent. The entire movie moves in and out of the time of freedom struggle and portraits many freedom fighters. Why Rang De Basanti couldn't make it at the Oscars -

• As already said, the movie moves in and out of the past. Though the concept was good, it created a huge confusion among the viewers at times, which as a result led to its failure

These were a few movies that we can discuss now, though there are other movies still left for discussion, there's no point in doing that now. Let's move ahead and hope that we can create a movie that will put the Indian culture in front of the world, and thus succeed in getting an Oscar.

Indian Movies At Oscars - Importance Of Oscars

What makes Oscars important for Indian movies?

• To achieve international appreciation
• To increase the market of Indian films worldwide
• As we deserve it

We all know that winning an academy award is nothing but achieving international appreciation so it’s important for us to win it to prove ourselves.

And by winning this award the range of market, for our films increases, which make the film, do well at box office. And this means the producer wouldn’t be at loss due to the lack of non-commercial elements in his movie.

The important thing is that we deserve the academy award for our films, there is no doubt that some discrimination towards Indian films exists otherwise it’s ridiculous that we haven’t won it till now even though decades have passed since its inception.

Do we really need an Academy award?

• As it’s just a normal award like any other
• As we have a national award which is more important
• As we already have a huge market for our films in abroad

We unnecessarily think about an award which is not for us and not given by someone who could understand our culture, emotions and feelings so why should we give it importance moreover we have won lots of appreciation for our films in other film festivals like Cannes film festival.

We do have a national award, which is more important for us, rather than a award which doesn’t belong to us. As many of Indian people are staying abroad, because of them there is already a huge market existing worldwide for Indian movies this is the reason for Indian movies doing well at abroad.

Does the hype created by media for Oscar’s necessary?

Every year when the ad’s for Oscars starts in television channels the media starts creating hype for it and gives it more importance than our national awards. They never telecast the national awards ceremony but they do it for academy awards. It’s the media, which is creating an unnecessary discussion about the awards and they even mention every time that we weren’t nominated even after knowing the reasons.

Indian Movies At Oscars - Causes Of Failure

• Politics in Indian selection committee
• Differences between local film industries here
• A good number of films being produced yearly
• Most of the movies being the remakes of English ones
• Less number of movies produced for the sake of human values

To explain the above terms briefly, let’s talk about the politics in Indian selection, we actually have a selection committee in India to select a movie among the Indian movies to send as the Indian entry to the Oscars. The committee consists of the members coming from different territories of India and they support the films of their region without looking for standards and the film from a region with more number of members will be selected irrespective of the standards. Due to this reason the film "Water" has been nominated for Oscars as a Canadian entry though being an Indian film.

Differences between the Indian film industries imply that we have many languages here in our country and each language has its own film industry. Most of the people abroad think that Indian films implies Hindi films but the actual fact is we have here films being produced in more than 25 languages and equal importance not being given to the films of all languages, every year it’s only a Hindi film that’s being selected as the Indian entry.

Yearly thousands of films are being produced in India and not even one film is being nominated for Oscars. Our films are not nominated at least for alternate years or at least for once in five years. From this we can understand the standard of our film making.

Another main reason is that famous English flicks inspire many of our films. Many of the Indian movies suffer the tag of plagiarism. Most of the popular Hindi and Telugu movies are remakes of a foreign movies or an English itself. A few of them are Josh (West Side Story), Shakti (Not Without My Daughter), Jism (Double Indemnity), Koi Mil Gaya (Extra Terrestrial). We cannot blame anyone for this fact since; it would be ridiculous if a foreign award was to be given to movie which itself is a copy of a foreign movie.

Here in India, films are produced to just entertain the people rather than for the sake of human values. The reason for this is that people here don’t show much interest towards a movie with less dose of entertainment and more of message or other stuff and due to this the films made for values doesn’t do well at the box office.

Non-realistic approach of a film implies the way we show certain things in our movies that doesn’t take place in real life. For example in an English if an actor flies in air or some thing he is shown as if he has super powers whereas in our movies the hero himself who is meant to be a common man has all the powers of a superman. Even in English they make films based on just imagination but not real but they give all the appropriate conditions to make that look true but here in our films a mother could know whatever happens to his son who is miles far away from her, we call it emotion or sentiment and they call it rubbish. But we can’t help it as our films are based on our culture and for the sake of Oscars we can’t change it.

Indian Movies At Oscars - Expectations Of The Jury

Previous Oscar Winners

The Oscar is a distant dream for the country's top award-winning filmmakers, but as thought it is not that we have never got an Oscar award.

• Bhanu Athaiya (1982) is the first Indian to get an Oscar. She received the Costume Design Award for her movie Ghandhi
• Satyajit Ray (1992) got an Oscar in the Lifetime Achievement Category

However these awards are customarily thought to be some sort of consolation.

What does the jury expect from a movie?

• A Good Script is something which properly conveys the message that the director imagines in his mind
• Realistic Approach in the sense to approach the script in most common way as if the story happened really and what if it happens really and all those cases which may take place if the story of the script is real
• Natural Way of Taking is to shoot the scenes so that the viewers feel that they were real
• A Good Cast is very necessary as they should suit the characters of the film and should enact them properly
• Proper publicity is to make the film reach the people near and abroad
• Movies should be made Straight to the Point instead of beating around the bush. On an average a movie in our country lasts for nearly for two and a half hours or three hours, on the other hand their films are just for about an hour and an half or two

Indian Movies At Oscars - Introduction

Recently few of my friends (Raghuveer, Bhanu Kishore, Swetha and Mounika) and I disturbed by the fact that India never won an Oscar decided to present a case study on the "Position of India at the Oscars" in a Non-Technical seminar at our college. This and the following few articles are about it.

The Academy Awards popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent and most watched film awards ceremony in the world. Awarded annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) since 1929 in Los Angeles. It recognizes excellence in many aspects of motion picture making such as acting, directing and screenwriting. AMPAS is a professional honorary organization which as of 2007 has a voting membership of 5,830. Actors (with a membership of 1,311) make up the largest voting block at 22%. The votes have been tabulated and certified by the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The only award that concerns us is the Best Foreign Language Film started in the year 1947. It is an yearly award for the best film in a language other than English. Though the award is given to the director, it is considered as an award to the Country of origin. Every year in each country a jury in that country can select the best non-English film of that country they may submit to the Academy. These form the so-called longlist. Five of these are nominated and one of them wins.

Operating Systems For Mobiles

An Operating System is a program which manages the hardware and software resources of any device. We are acquainted with the Operating System of our computer which is usually Windows or Linux, but how many of us know that the mobile which we use also has an operating system of its own. A few of the operating systems that are widely used in mobiles are the Symbian, PalmSource, Microsoft Windows, Linux, etc.

Symbian OS is an operating system designed for mobile devices with associated libraries, user interface frameworks and reference implementations of common tools, produced by Symbian Ltd. Several mobile companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung use it. Its major advantage is the fact that it was built for handheld devices, with limited resources, that may be running for months or years. There is a strong emphasis on conserving memory, using Symbian specific programming idioms. They keep memory usage low and memory leaks rare. Further Symbian OS programming is event based, and the CPU is switched off when applications are not directly dealing with an event. Also they may also provide better battery life. Most of the Symbian OS programs can be programmed in OPL, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, JavaME, etc. This OS has been subject to a variety of viruses, the best known of which is Cabir, however anti-virus soft wares have been developed to overcome the effects of these viruses. Some of the devices that use this OS are the S60 series such as the N72, Nokia 6630 and many more.

Palm OS is a compact operating system developed and licensed by PalmSource, Inc. for personal digital assistants manufactured by various licensees. It is designed to be easy-to-use and similar to desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. The Palm series and Treo 650 are a few of the famous models using this OS.

Further some of the operating systems used for computers like Windows and Linux are also used in mobiles. However they are not as popular as the others mentioned. The Samsung Black Jack, Motorola Q are few of the smart phones which use the Windows OS. Motorola first launched the Linux OS with its model E680.

Interesting Facts

1. Money isn't made out of paper; it is made out of cotton
2. The 57 on a Heinz ketchup bottle represent the variety of pickles the Company once had
3. Your stomach produces a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself
4. The dot over the letter 'i' is called the title
5. A duck's quack doesn't echo, no one knows why
6. Forty percent of McDonalds profit comes from the sales of 'Happy Meals'
7. Every person has a unique tongue print
8. 315 entries in Websters 1996 dictionary were misspelled
9. On an average 12 newborns will be given to wrong parents daily
10. During the famous chariot scene in "Ben Hur", a small red car can be seen at a distance
11. Warren Beatty and Shirley Maclaine are brother and sister
12. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces will kill a small sized dog
13. Most lipsticks contain fish scales
14. Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants
15. Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as a medicine
16. Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time
17. There are no clocks in the Las Vegas gambling casinos
18. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver
19. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it go mad instantly and sting itself to death
20. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand
21. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class
22. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying
23. The glue on Israeli postage stamp is certified kosher (halal)
24. Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries
25. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a space suit damages them

UNIX

UNIX is derived from the word UNICS - Uniplexed Information and Computing System. It's a computer operating system originally developed by AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Rithchie, and Douglas Mcllroy. Over the years, several Unix like operating system such as Linux, Mac OS X have been encountered.

Unix is an operating system widely used in both servers and work stations. It is more useful at server space than at client space. It is considered to be very reliable and secure. The various components of the Unix operating system are

• Kernel - Handles memory management, system calls, etc.
• Development Environment - Includes libraries, compilers and assemblers
• Commands - Contains the executable commands
• Documentation - Contains the manuals and documents for various commands

Though the earlier version did not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the later versions even included the GUI component.

Later, a GNU Project was announced to create a free Unix like system. A compatible Kernel was successfully developed called Linux. Examples of these Linux based Operating Systems are Fedora, SUSE, Mandrake.

Graphic Cards

A Graphics Processing Unit (Visual Processing Unit) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, a workstation or a gaming console. Their highly parallel structure makes them more efficient than a typical CPU for a range of complex algorithms. The most common operations of these devices is their 2D graphic support. However the modern GPUs even support 3D graphics and include digital video related functions. Examples of companies that produce such GPUs are GeForce and Radeon.

Modern GPUs use transistors to do calculations related to 3D computer graphics. They are widely used for texture mapping and rendering polygons. Since most of these computations involve matrix and vector operations, GPUs are also being used for non-graphical calculations. Recent graphics cards even decode high definition video on the card, taking some load off the central processing unit.

The presently available Graphic Cards can be classified as

• Dedicated Graphics Cards - The term "dedicated" refers to the fact that these cards have RAM that is dedicated to the card's use. These cards are removable as they interface with the motherboard by means of an expansion slot such as "PCI Express Graphics" or "Accelerated Graphics Port". They are considered to be the most powerful class of GPUs present. Examples includes the graphic cards from GeForce and Radeon
• Integrated Graphics Solutions - These are graphics processors that utilize a portion of a computer's system RAM rather than dedicated graphics memory. Such solutions are typically far less expensive to implement in comparison to dedicated graphics solutions. However they are considered unfit to play modern games as well as run graphically intensive programs. Modern desktop motherboards often include an integrated graphics solution and have expansion slots available to add a dedicated card later. An example is the Intel built in graphic card
• Hybrid Solutions - This type of graphic cards competes with the integrated graphics in the lower end PCs. They are a bit more expensive than Integrated Graphics but cheaper than dedicated cards. They share memory with the system memory, that is, they utilize a part of their internal memory and a part of the system RAM. It is important to note how much of the system memory is utilized besides the total memory. Examples are Hypermemory and Turbocache
• Stream Processing - A new concept application of GPUs is that of stream processing and the General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU). In certain applications requiring massive vector operations, this can yield several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. Still efforts are being made to pursue this new market with an array of applications

To know about your graphics card, follow these four simple steps

1. Open start menu
2. Select Run
3. Type dxdiag and press Enter (This actually runs the diagnostics of DirectX)
4. Select the display option to know about the graphic card

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is one of the most popular words in the mobile industry. It is basically a cable replacement technology. It is a substitute to the cables which have become a pain in many houses and offices. Technically, a Bluetooth is a protocol of short range frequency hopping radio link.

It was first developed by Sven Mattison and Jaap Haartsen who were working for Ericsson Mobile platforms. Bluetooth is formally known as IEEE 802.15.1.

The name Bluetooth is derived from a Danish Viking and King Harald Blatand (translated as Bluetooth in English) who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. He united and controlled Denmark and Norway. He got his name from his very dark hair which was uncommon for Vikings. Blatand means dark complexion. However a more popular reason is that he had a strong inclination for eating blueberries which made his teeth stained with the color. Its logo merges with the Nordic runes analogous to the modern Latin H and B.

Bluetooth is known for its low power consumption and a low production cost. But at the same time it has a short range. However as it uses a radio communications system, the devices which are undergoing a Bluetooth communication need be in line of sight, as long as the transmission is powerful enough.

One of the most important applications of this Bluetooth is in data transfer. It uses the SAFER+ algorithm for authentication and key generation for preventing eavesdropping. It has even replaced the traditionally used Infrared. This is because data transfer in Infrared takes place in the form of straight lines where as on the other hand, for Bluetooth it is concentric circles. This technology has even crept into the gaming industry in the form of wireless controls for game consoles like Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3.

Along with Bluetooth, there is the WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) which is widely used in homes and offices. Even in the game consoles mentioned above. WiFi uses the same radio frequency as that of Bluetooth, but with higher power consumption resulting in a stronger connection. Spatial capacity is a method used to compare the efficiency of wireless transmission protocols.

The future versions of Bluetooth code named Libson and Seattle concentrate more on enabling faster data transfer with low power operations.