Tamil Nadu State Awards - 2005, 2006

The Tamil Nadu State Film awards were for both 2005 and 2006 were announced a few weeks ago. Indian film awards rarely award real talent. Politics, regional biases, nepotism all play a part in the awards, resulting in real talent rarely getting rewarded (I think the most glaring example of this is the fact that Sivaji never won a National award while MGR won the Best Actor award – and for Rickshaakkaaran of all movies!). All the aforementioned occur in our own State awards too. No one even pretends that the awards are serious and everyone knows that that the awards have only two criteria – spread out the awards among many different films and personalities to ensure that the awards function is really well-attended and hand out prominent awards to popular actors so they are kept happy and on good terms with the ruling party. The recently announced awards are further proof of this.

Rajnikanth won the best actor award for Chandramukhi and I’ll be the first to accept that of all his recent movies (except maybe Baba), he deserved the award least for Chandramukhi. Barring the scenes where he played Vettaiyan, his performance was pretty average. I really thought Vikram would win the award since it was a high-profile, critically-praised performance in a commercially successful movie. But he missed out on even the ‘Special Prize’ for Best Actor, which went to Vijay(for Tiruppaachi) and Surya (for Ghajini). Vikram must’ve really pissed off someone on the award committee! Jo won the Best Actress award for Chandramukhi and though she was more deserving of the award, it would have to be more for her hard work than her performance. Meera Jasmine won the Special Prize for Best Actress. While Chandramukhi won Best Picture, Shankar snapped up the Best Director award for Anniyan. Raj Kiran and Kalairani won the Character Artiste awards (did some party protest against calling it the Supporting Actor/Actress awards?!) for Sandakkozhi and Kodambakkam respectively.

The 2006 awards actually seem a lot more fair and there’s not much cause for complaint there. Not all winners were the best in their category but only a couple of the major categories had winners that were blatantly undeserving. Best Actor went to Kamal for Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu and Best Actress went to Priyamani for Paruthi Veeran. I feel Karthi was way more deserving of an award for Paruthi Veeran but he had to be happy with the Special Prize for Best Actor. Sandhya got the Special Prize for Best Actress for Dishyum. Veyyil won the Best Film award while Thirumurugan won the Best Director award for Em Magan. Among the laughably silly awards – Best Storywriter for Perarasu for Tirupathi (this might have more for Ajith though, to ensure that he was related to atleast 1 award since Varalaaru was completely shut out). Also surprising was Pasupathy winning the Best Villain award for E, though I’m pretty sure his character in it can’t be characterized as a villain. Guess they had to find an award for him after he lost out the Best Character Artiste to Nasser, who won it for Em Magan.

While on the topic of awards, did anyone catch the awards show telecast on SUN TV on Vinayaka Chaturthi? That had to be the most pathetic awards show I’ve ever seen. It was attended by very few of our actors and it was so obvious from the awards given out that the only aim of the show was to give out an award to everyone who was kind enough to attend the function. So we had to watch atrocities like Mumtaj getting an award for acting and Deva’s son getting an award for best music director (Aish fans who didn’t watch the show… consider yourselves really lucky since you missed seeing Mumtaj dance for Dhoom Machaale…!). The weirdest award though was a ‘Best Magician’ award that was handed out to Alex! I still have no idea what that award was for.