There are two things that I noticed about the just-announced MTV Movie & TV Awards . The first was the really weird categories like ‘Best Kiss’ and ‘Best Fight’ and ‘Most Frightened Performance’ (what about the ‘Most Frightened Audience ’ for which we have strong contenders in India like Radhe and Coolie No1?) .
While I was overjoyed to see a young actress of Indian origin Maitrayee Ramkrishnan in the nominations for Best Kiss(well done, Maitrayee, I hope your parents are proud of you) I also wondered with some alarm and much trepidation if the whole idea of cultural inclusiveness in the awards is acquiring a kind of disproportionate dimension.
There is a profusion of colored actors in the list, and many of them are highly talented and enormously worthy contenders. No one can deny Chadwick Boseman deserves the Best Actor, not even Anthony Hopkins . MTV doesn’t have a separate category for Best Actor but a common category called ‘Best Performance In A Movie’which this year had 3 black nominees out of 5.
Which is fine. Awards should be colour blind. But that is not the way it seems this time.
I am afraid Zendaya in the disastrous Malcolm & Marie certainly didn’t deserve to be in the nominations.
Are the awards becoming an equivalent of quota reservations in the Indian administrative services? Celebrate excellence. Not Ethnicity,please.
Having said this ,I must say the MTV awards given to many of the Black performers are richly deserved. Anthony Mackie for ‘Best Hero’ in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ are rock stars. But hey, non-colored people too deserve a chance.We can’t ignore them just because we want to celebrate colour.
