Films release, tickets are bought, and then you wonder if you should have carried a bunch of rotten tomatoes (not the website, silly! The real stuff) to fling at the screen. Well, why punish the theatre’s cleaning staff when you can actually (dis)honour the movers and shakers of Bollywood?
Sorabh Pant, Sahil Rizwan and Karan Anshuman are the founders of India’s first Ghanta Awards. While Sorabh’s a stand-up comedian, Sahil and Karan run popular film-related websites. Sahil often watches disappointing films and creates a cartoon strip out of them on The Vigil Idiot. Karan runs a serious informative website about cinema called Upper Stall. The lack of a refund system drove the trio to establish the awards. The jury, made up of Sahil & Karan, has short-listed five nominees across 12 categories. All these nominations have been handpicked from the films that were released between Diwali 2009 and Diwali 2010. The voting started a little over a month ago and has already seen more than 500 people cast 10,000 votes across all categories.
Since the Ghantas are also Bollywood’s first tech-savvy awards, voting happens only on the website. You can sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account to cast your vote. Voting is open till January 6, 2011. Sorabh Pant was hoping to present the awards at a ceremony more elaborate than the Oscars, hosted on Mars with dancing unicorns and ‘imported platinum statuettes’. “The awards ceremony would probably culminate into a comedy night with a few comedians who are ready to kill their Bollywood careers,” said Pant.
Though the organisers aren’t sure how the ceremony will be conducted, they are sure that Bollywood biggies will show up for the ceremony because of their greed for awards. The idea is to keep the awards looking mighty serious and then spring a surprise on the attendees.
But what about next year? “Ghantas can be a pseudonym and we’ll just market the awards as the ‘Grand Hollywood Awards Needed To Accentuate Supremacy’ or something like that,” said Pant.
All in all, with Shakti Kapoor as their shining brand ambassador, The Ghantas are set to rock Bollywood next January. Have you voted yet?