Oscar fail… again: Why snubbing The Lunchbox is idiotic

The Film Federation of India seems to be suffering from some kind of bipolar disorder. Last year they were lambasted for sending Barfi! to the Oscars as India’s entry for Best Foreign Film even though they knew it was a little too Amelie in Darjeeling. This year they swung to the other extreme. The jury, in its wisdom, selected something so artsy and obscure that hardly anyone seems to have actually seen it. Most of us first heard about Gyan Correa’s Gujarati film The Good Road, a lost-and-found story about a boy and truckers in the Rann of Kutch, when it was anointed India’s great new Oscar hope. The FFI jury would protest it can do nothing right. [caption id=“attachment_1127925” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: ibn live[/caption] It has been hauled over the coals for its blinkered Bollywood bias ignoring India’s rich regional cinema. Even when it goes Bollywood, writes Firstpost ’s Lakshmi Chaudhry, the jury’s mantra is “(b)etter a big-ticket dud than a small budget gem.” Jeans. Guru. Taare Zameen Par. Rang de Basanti. Devdas. The bigger the better. This year the committee chose a small-budget Gujarati film as opposed to a big-ticket Bollywood dud. Shouldn’t the FFI be getting some credit for a bit of course correction? It would. In any other year. As Nandini Ramnath writes in The Mint in any other year, the selection of The Good Road would have been hailed as “mature, tasteful, and in step with the current language of cinema around the world.” But this was not any other year. This was the year of The Lunchbox. After a very long time India had the chance of sending a film to the Oscars that already had both critical and popular acclaim going for it. I have not seen The Good Road so I cannot comment on its quality. Gautam Ghose, the jury chair, admits he “personally loved The Lunchbox” but says the jury chose The Good Road because it found in it an “India that you don’t see very often in films. The many Indians within the spectrum of one film is what fascinated the jury.” Gujarati critic Shishir Ramavat calls it weak in direction and acting and complains that most of the actors speak awful Gujarati. The Good Road might be a hidden gem but it’s going to need a lot of polishing to shine. The film didn’t make any waves in Gujarat among audiences or critics. It lasted barely a week in theaters in Gujarat. The Lunchbox, like the dabba, comes ready-to-serve. The film comes with festival street cred. It garnered the highest aggregate score of any Indian film according to both review-aggregator sites BollyMovieReviewz and Review Gang. It even opened to a standing ovation at Cannes where it won the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award. So it’s a film that has already proven it can stand its ground in international competition. Sony has picked it up for distribution. It will release internationally. It makes marketing the film, never India’s strong suit, that much easier. It has as its star, Irrfan Khan, the closest India has to an internationally respected star, a face familiar to foreign audiences thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, the HBO series In Practice and even Spiderman. Ritesh Batra, the director is a newbie, but with an NYU film school/Sundance pedigree. The Telegraph reports The Good Road’s director Gyan Correa was a neighbour of Satyajit Ray’s when he lived in Kolkata as a boy. Alas, that probably will not swing any votes in its favour among the Oscar judges. “The Lunchbox is an international film that will work in India as it’s an Indian story with Indian characters and conflicts,” says Batra. That’s what makes it a made-to-order Oscar contender – a universal story of loneliness and communication but in a setting that’s uniquely Indian – just the way the Academy likes its foreign language films served up. As Lakshmi Chaudhry writes the Indian three movies that have made the Best Film shortlist exemplified that. “Mother India, Lagaan, or Salaam Bombay, each told distinctively Indian stories, set in a distinctively Indian milieu, populated by distinctively Indian characters.” The dabbawala network and its sterling six sigma Forbes rating of one mistake in six million has been the subject of much western fascination from the Harvard Business School to Prince Charles to Richard Branson. The Lunchbox deftly capitalizes on that but does not forget to spin a tender human story around it as well. That story does not get lost in translation unlike 2010’s Peepli Live which really needed an Indian audience to get its black humour. As some have argued, the FFI jury surely had laudable motives in going for The Good Road and ignoring the popular pressure for The Lunchbox. “The committee seems to have said that we want the world to know we can make such films as The Good Road. It might not be the most pragmatic decision, but if it helps the movie to journey into new directions, so be it,” writes Ramnath. But the point of this exercise is not about creating “new directions” for a film like The Good Road, deserving as it might be. If we are to go through the trouble of submitting an entry for the Best Foreign Film, then it’s ridiculous to ignore the one that has the best odds to make it to the final shortlist. ‘The Lunchbox’ had every factor working in its favour, we may have just lost our golden chance. Sad," tweeted an upset Karan Johar. Choosing The Lunchbox just because it has “every factor working in its favour” could be sneered at as being opportunistic. But in a nation where the opportunity for an Oscar is so rare it’s a crying shame not to be opportunistic when we can. Without taking anything away from The Good Road, the chances the stars will align up this well again sometime soon are remote. Let’s just hope it’s better than one in six million.