Between Shah Rukh Khan and The Kerala Story – National Awards are about populism and propaganda

Indian Express

3 days ago

Until the early 2000s, film-related awards and award functions had immense credibility and popularity. This was true not only in India but across the world. Whether it was the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, BAFTAs or our own National Awards, their validation of a film's quality was taken seriously. Awards helped the film gain wider audience appeal and pushed the careers of the artists involved.
But with the rise of the internet and social media, the voices debating a film's excellence have become more diverse. The internet's collective opinion of a film, whether it's about the direction, an actor's performance or the background score, is gaining more traction than that of any expert panel. This phenomenon was reflected in the immense popularity of audience-ranked online platforms like IMDb. But around the mid-2010s, when IMDb's rating and ranking mechanism was found to be heavily skewed by certain genre-based fan biases, it began to quickly lose its credibility. Today, film viewers are cautiously migrating to another user-rating platform called Letterboxd, which allows for more insightful commentary.
In this changed landscape, film awards that were once influential and glamorous have rapidly lost their shine. Unlike before, when popular awards shaped public opinion on cinema, today social media conversations appear to be heavily influencing film award panels. As they struggle to remain both relevant and credible, film awards seem to be increasingly driven by the desire to appeal to popular social media narratives.
It is in this context that we must see how honours like the Academy Awards or National Awards are handed out today. With the steadily declining viewership of the Academy Awards since the late 1990s, a desperation to appeal to young audiences and stay in step with social media political culture has become evident. The case of the film Emilia Perez (2024) offers a striking example. For her role in the film, actor Karla Sofia Gascon had initially won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. The film also received 14 nominations across various categories in the Academy Awards, including Best Actress. Eventually, however, Emilia Perez won only two Academy Awards, following the post-nomination backlash with the discovery of Gascon's racist and Islamophobic tweets.
In India, popular awards given by private enterprises or associations like the Filmfare Awards, South Indian International Movie Awards or Vijay TV awards have long been driven by the tastes of the film-viewing public. The presence of stars at awards shows is crucial to stoke public curiosity and generate viewership, which means that the award list is often deliberately designed to accommodate this requirement.
The National Awards, instituted by the Union government and presented by the National Film Development Corporation of India have amusingly been trying to achieve a mixed-masala standard of all the above mentioned reasons — wanting to appeal to social media culture like the Academy Awards, be unabashedly populist like the Filmfare Awards and, increasingly, provide critical validation to films with propagandist ambitions in line with the ruling party's politics.
What this approach means is that when a factually incorrect and dangerously propagandist film like The Kerala Story (2023) is awarded two National Awards, including for Best Direction, critics can be silenced by pointing to another Malayalam film Ullozhukku (2024), focusing on the relationship between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in a patriarchal structure, that has also won two National Awards. The charge of validating The Kerala Story's Islamophobia can be countered by arguing that a Muslim superstar has won his first National Award for acting after 33 years of his career — that even Shah Rukh Khan would be reduced to his Muslim identity is part of such narrowed discourse.
And if Ullozhukku's win gives the National Award panel its feminist credentials, Kathal – A Jackfruit Mystery's Best Hindi Feature Film award gives it anti-caste brownie points. That the protagonist's identity as a Dalit woman is only a superficial trope ensures that the film's politics is easier to digest than the titular jackfruit.
And it was not only Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023)'s win for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment that had populist appeal. Shah Rukh Khan's performance in an adrenaline-pumping masala film like Jawan (2023) and Bhagavanth Kesari's (2023) Best Telugu Feature Film award can together challenge the populist appeal of a Filmfare award edition.
Beyond such active curation, there are certainly several deserving films, artists and technicians who have won this year. However, when we look at the National Award list as a whole, what comes through is the pushing of propaganda using the mixed approach of appealing to populism and maintaining credibility. In the long run, such measures would only make the awards less trustworthy and more irrelevant with every passing year.
The writer is a Chennai-based filmmaker