The Hindu Business Line : The Oscar factor

In a rare show, Hollywood films, especially Oscar nominations, have done better than Bollywood films so far this year in India... thanks to the curiosity factor.

A still from `The Aviator'.

Rarely does Hollywood steal the show from Bollywood in India. But in the first quarter of 2005, mainstream movies from the US have taken the lead, if not in absolute gross terms, then certainly in face value.

An action adventure like National Treasure, starring Nicholas Cage, which was released countrywide in the first week of January, has done well enough to please Columbia Tristar. Says Nitin Bhikchandani, New Delhi-based Assistant Sales Manager with the studio conglomerate, "The movie's performance as the top grosser in the first three months of the year has to do with the popularity of Cage, as well as genre."

February and March saw a clutch of Oscar-studded movies, Finding Neverland and The Aviator came before the Oscars were announced, and both found audiences because they came richly nominated. "The buzz really helps," says Bhikchandani. It is another matter that the excitement ebbed soon after.

Interestingly enough, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which had the richest Oscar haul, including that for Best Director, came a couple of weeks after the awards were announced and has not done as well as expected.

Industry watchers attribute this to two factors. Strategically, it should have been released before the awards were announced, for the curiosity factor to remain high. Even more important, there's the crucial bit about cultural preferences. Movies with depressing endings traditionally do not do well in India. Viewers did not like the fact that the plucky boxer played by Hillary Swank (Best Actress) came to such a sorry pass in the movie.

Likewise, Ray, the beautifully crafted bio-pic on jazz legend Ray Charles, has been doing well only on weekends in multiplexes. Compared to Martin Scorsese's lush profile of Howard Hughes, which packed them at the starting lap, Ray appears to be a non-starter. "People came to see Ray because it got the Best Actor award, but the main problem with it was that audiences did not connect with either the subject or the treatment," says a US studio representative in New Delhi. "Shows in the first three days had to be cancelled because there were just not enough people."

Johnny Depp, the lead actor of Finding Neverland, is well known in ultra-urban pockets, but the film, based on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan character, suffered because it doesn't have mass appeal. Leonardo DiCaprio fared better than the broody Depp, even though the former, who was as much a poster-boy post Titanic in India and in other parts of the globe, quite simply did not have as much appeal as the eccentric American billionaire. But both lost out to Jamie Foxx, who played Ray; and Scorsese lost out yet again in his bid to get that coveted Best Director Award.

Last year, there was much more profit tied to Oscar nominees. Warner Bros' The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King had 13 nominations, and it picked up every single one of them. The film was a big commercial success too. This year, none of the major studios were involved in India with the Oscar-awardees (except for Paramount, which had Ray). The Aviator was a Warner Bros movie in the US, but the studio did not have its international rights. In India PVR Pictures imported it and spent a lot of thought and focus on promoting and publishing the movie, showing up the inadequate effort which surrounded the other films.

There is no doubt that even if the Oscar runners did not rake it in, they lent sheen to the marquee. But because the trade wants healthy bottomlines, studios are already looking ahead to the summer with optimism. Both Ocean's 12 and Constantine have done well (the latter much better than Warner Bros expected), and a whole slew of exciting stuff is coming up. Columbia Tristar has big hopes from the Will Smith comedy Hitch, and the Jennifer Lopez-Richard Gere-Susan Sarandon starrer Shall We Dance, as well as XXX2, the high octane sequel to XXX, starring Ice Cube.

And Warner Bros is also looking bullish with Miss Congeniality 2 (the original, starring Sandra Bullock, was a big hit here), Mr and Mrs Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Be Cool with John Travolta and Uma Thurman, as well as the next in line in the money-spinning franchises of Batman and Star Wars.

With the action hotting up on the biggies, there appears to be a question mark on the arrival of Sideways, which turned out to be the sleeper hit of 2004. Alexander Payne's bitter-sweet saga of middle-age blues segueing into a surprisingly sharp morality play, which was a critics' darling, clearly did not impress the Oscar jury so much (only one lesser Oscar, for the screenplay). In a marketplace, where niche is still a bad word, Sideways seems too much of a risk.

Bollywood's woes continue

Bollywood has had only two successes in the same period: Page 3 and Black. Everything else has bitten the dust: from the big-budget extravaganzas like Bewafa, directed by Dharmesh Darshan, who has had a string of cheesy failures for some time, Kisna, Subhash Ghai's song-and-dance drama set in the 1940s, to the sleaze-and-sex romps like Sheesha, Chahat and Fun, to the absolute no-hopers like Rog and Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav, and the `small' alternatives like One Dollar Curry, Kaya Taran, and Chai Pani.

It is the same old story: that all these films, claiming to be the face of the new-age Bollywood are telling the same old story. Sorry, but no sale.

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