If Smita Patil were to witness Katrina Kaif receiving the Smita Patil Memorial Award for Best Actor by the socio-cultural and educational organisation Priyadarshini Academy recently, she would probably cringe in contrition. Social media users went berserk on Katrina bagging the award, raising eyebrows on how some of these Bollywood film awards are a mere sham. Are these winners really deserving of the awards they get? We find out.
There was almost an outrage over the question whether Katrina Kaif deserved the honour with Twitterati and Facebook trolling the star with digs and guffaws galore on her contribution to Bollywood. While some awards are given out to the deserving, most are just to massage some star’s ego by creating an award which didn’t even exist before.
Stand-up comedian, theatre and film actor Karthik Kumar, popularly known as Evam Karthik who has won two national awards says, “Every award has its own agenda and politics. Even naming an award after Smita Patil might have been backed by some politics and manipulation. But what Kats won isn’t even institutionalised by the Smita Patil Foundation. We should just let the lady live in her few moments of glory.”
South Indian film actor Sanjjanaa Archana Galrani feels, “There are different levels and grades in award functions including one thanks to audience polls. Awards today are not taken seriously by most actors. Look at Akshay Kumar’s career graph where his film would have been box office hits, but Shah Rukh Khan would bag all the awards. Sometimes, we’re even told that if we attend an award function, we will get an award, but not all awards are rigged. If only critically-acclaimed actors get the awards and not commercial actors, then no one will watch the award functions and the TRPs will drop. So it has to be a combination of both.”
Sorabh Pant who presented The Worst Tweeter Award at The Ghanta Awards quips asking, ‘don’t most Bollywood awards work like that?’ “They would have thought Katrina Kaif is free on this day and she’s famous, so let’s just give her an award. So far none of us knew that this award exists. But I like her and hope she continues to give her gyrations. There have been so many crazy awards. Even Saif Ali Khan won a national award for Hum Tum. Next, we might hear that the Smita Patil award went to Shah Rukh Khan, whose hobby seems to be just winning all the awards,” quips Sorabh.
