Oscar-bashing is a hobby for many at the start of every year. Nothing the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States do seems to please anybody.
Yet they have almost never found themselves in the conundrum of nominating a movie that enjoyed neither boxoffice success nor some sort of critical acclaim, even if they cannot always decide which they prefer.
Just like the people behind the Oscars, the organisers of the inaugural Singapore Film Awards cannot make up their minds either. Some of the odd choices on the nomination list suggest that neither popularity nor quality was a determining factor.
The nominees in the Best Film category are Royston Tan’s 12 Lotus, Han Yew Kwang’s 18 Grams Of Love, Cheng Ding An’s Kallang Roar The Movie, Tony Kern’s A Month Of Hungry Ghosts, Kelvin Tong’s Rule #1 and Lucky7 by Sun Koh, K. Rajagopal, Boo Junfeng, Brian Gothong Tan, Chew Tze Chuan, Ho Tzu Nyen and Tania Sng.
Kallang Roar, which is about Singapore’s legendary football coach Choo Seng Quee in the 1970s, received middling reviews and earned only $90,000 at the box office. How exactly does the film fit into even the most generous definition of the word “best”?
You could also argue that there is a vast difference between Tong’s polished Rule#1 and the experimental Lucky7. To lump them together does neither film justice.
The new awards come under the umbrella of the Singapore International Film Festival’s Silver Screen Awards, which were introduced in 1991 with an Asian feature film component as well as a local short film competition.
To qualify for the Singapore Film Awards, the films must be feature length (at least 60 minutes in duration), shot mostly in Singapore and with a Singaporean or permanent resident holding a major creative role as director, producer, writer or actor. They also have to be completed and screened in the previous calendar year.
The inaugural nominees competing in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Performance and Best Cinematography are a hodgepodge group that gives little indication as to what exactly the awards are meant to honour.
Are they an unabashed popularity contest along the lines of the MTV Movie Awards, whose categories include Best Kiss and Best Fight? Clearly not, since the experimental anthology Lucky7 received three nods for Best Film, Best Performance and Best Cinematography.
Maybe they are meant to reward quality? After all, they are associated with the Silver Screen Awards, which has tended to shower accolades on arthouse offerings such as Indonesian film-maker Garin Nugroho’s Ramayana-inspired Opera Jawa (2006).
In that case, one wonders if the bar has been set too low. Of the 20 entries the organisers received, six are being considered for Best Film. That 30 per cent of the local films released last year were deemed good enough for that category is just way too generous by any yardstick.
The powers-that-be should take a leaf from the committee behind the Singapore Literature Prize, which is held once every two years, to maintain the quality of the picks. Even then, there were only three nominees for the English writing section in 2006.
In fact, why have a separate category for home-grown films in the first place and risk having the Singapore Film Awards seem like a poorer cousin to the Asian Feature Film Competition?
Local films have been nominated and even won when going head-to-head against regional entries. In 2006, Tong was named Best Director for Love Story.
This year, Singaporean Alec Tok’s A Big Road, about the lives of three women in Shanghai, is among the Asian Feature Film Competition nominees. His film has not been released here, so it is ineligible for the Singapore Film Awards.
If the Singapore Film Awards are intended to encourage film-makers, then one has to ask: How much back-patting and hand-holding do aspiring film-makers need? The Singapore Short Film Competition’s list of past winners already reads like a who’s who of Singapore cinema today.
Eric Khoo won the main prize that first year for August; Tong, Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng’s A Moveable Feast was named Best Short Film in 1996; Jack Neo won for Best Director for Replacement Killers in 1998; and Royston Tan’s Sons picked up two awards in 2000.
To their credit, the organisers of the Singapore Film Awards are not unaware of some of these pitfalls.
Ms Yuni Hadi, one of two new directors of the Singapore International Film Festival, said: “Taiwan, Hong Kong, Turkey and even Thailand have their own local film awards, but the question always is ‘Will a Singapore Oscars work?’ We don’t know.
“But I think we have to take a chance and begin this movie journey for Singapore cinema. The Singapore Film Awards is a chance for us to celebrate our local talent.”
Celebrating local talent is a laudable sentiment, but an award with questionable standards and one unclear about what it stands for does neither itself nor the films it is supposed to honour any good.
(ST)