Stranger Than Fiction

It was officially announced - Vidhu Vinod Chopra's "Eklavya" is going to the 2008 Oscars as the Indian Foreign Language entry. The announcement met with the usual "will it ?"s and "won't it ?"s for a while, and would have been shoved aside to make news for Rahul Gandhi, when all hell broke loose.

Bhavna Talwar, who made "Dharm", another contender for the Academy entry, first went to the media telling whoever would listen that Eklavya was a bad film and her film deserved to go to the Oscars [You'll find the HT link here] Once HT, TOI, the Hindu and IE had saturated their Filmi Khabar section and Aaj Tak had aired her views on that "Breaking News" strip at the bottom of the screen, she actually - I mean it, she did this - filed a petition at the Bombay high court, calling for an investigation into the selection of Eklavya. In the meantime, selection committee members, "serious" actors, "joking" actors, Bhavna Talwar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and NDTV knows who else have presented soundbytes to the media either describing the shadowy conspiracy in smoke-filled selection committee rooms, or deriding "The young filmmaker whose film hasn’t gone..." for "having durrty crab mentality". The latest has been this "Front Page Headline" - the Bombay High court has given the Film Selection committee 10 days to file a reply to their evaluation that "there seems to be merit in the argument that the selection process was biased....." The matter will be decided during a date in October blah blah blah

The truth has not only become stranger than fiction, it's turned into some sort of Academy Award winning screenplay itself now - the kind of satirical one Cho Ramaswamy would write and Farooq Sheikh/Naseeruddin Shah would act in back in the 80's.

Amazing, ain't it?