I know this is too late to talk anything about the movie, RRR’s Oscar win for the song, ‘Naatu Naatu’. But with my day job and other obligations in life getting in the way, it’s only now that I got the time to reflect on the reaction we got for our podcast episode that I did with my friends recently.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, my friends and I recently recorded a podcast discussing RRR’s Oscar win and whether it deserved that win or not.
What did we discuss in the episode?
Sorry for the 1-hour long conversation. Only after we finished recording did we realize we dragged it too long. But we did make some interesting points.
Here’s a short summary of what happened in the episode:
- How Oscars have changed over the years
- The RRR debate: here is where my friend, Steve a.k.a. Robin went off on a rant about the movie (making him react to Tollywood movies is like asking Joe Biden to finish saying a sentence without experiencing a brain freeze, it’s a match made in hell, but we made him do it for fun)
- Praise from several other great filmmakers for RRR
- The mindset of audiences who like movies like RRR
- Our final thoughts
The episode was just 3 casual movie watchers (Steve a.k.a. Robin, Shanthi, and me – Vimal) who decided one day to talk about RRR’s win and put a camera in front and record the discussion.
What most people got wrong about RRR’s Oscar win for ‘Naatu Naatu’?
The song, ‘Naatu Naatu’ isn’t even M.M.Keeravaani’s (who is one of the best Indian film music directors by the way) best work, nor is it the best Telugu song, or the best Indian song ever made. He made way better music before. I think this is one of the reasons why most people thought the song didn’t deserve the win.
And it’s the same with A.R.Rahman’s win for the song, ‘Jai ho’ at the 2009 Oscars. I can name 25 other Rahman songs at the top of my head that are far better than ‘Jai ho’.
But the song, ‘Naatu Naatu’ is a banger. It does get you going. In my opinion, it’s the best song among all the other songs that were nominated.
And who decides that? The Oscar jury.
One more thing: the jury didn’t just listen to the song, but watched the music video. Combined with the music, S.S.Rajamouli’s direction, the choreography, the setting, Ramcharan & NTR Jr’s dance, and the work of the entire team, this song connected really well with the western audience. It’s not just hype.
Here’s Rajamouli breaking down the music video on Vanity Fair.
It’s the reason why the west loves RRR – the movie so much. They’ve never been exposed to such a thing before. For them, it’s completely new and fresh.
But for us, it’s just another movie because we’ve all grown up on such movies and music.
Here’s another take: The Oscars has been losing viewership in the past decade, falling by nearly half from 43 million viewers in 2014 to 23 million in 2020. Then, the very next year, they dropped again by more than half to 10.4 million.
Maybe it was a business decision to hand over the win to ‘Naatu Naatu’: a marketing tactic to grab audiences from a growing economic superpower like India (we’re over 1.5 billion people here and the 5th largest economy by GDP). Or maybe it was the result of woke politics in Hollywood. Or maybe it was the result of a truly honest appreciation for our movies.
Whatever may be the reason, we really don’t need an Oscar validation to appreciate our movies. It just so happened that RRR, which wasn’t made for the global audience connected well with the west.
Also, we need to be happy for someone’s win, even if we don’t like their work. Because a win is a win. It’s not as if all of us win accolades at work for our best work. Heck, some of us are wasting our time here writing crappy blogs like this instead of working on something more useful on a Saturday evening.
