Indonesian Movie Awards 2007

You know that i had to write about this Indonesian Movie Awards. First of all, what was this? This award was created by the biggest private TV station in Indonesia in what i think the idea was coming up during the wake of dissatisfied public against the recent disastrous award that is Festival Film Indonesia. Some producers sees the opportunity in the event which sparked and spiced with some of high profiled Actors and Directors actually give back their Citra's statuette as a protest, that maybe by creating another film festival – allegedly named Indonesian Movie Awards – would probably rob the status quo as the biggest and the most important film festival in Indonesia. The question is of course, did it work?

Presentation. This has been the biggest and un-ignorable failure of this pretentious award ceremony. It felt empty, monotonous, and kinda forced. The award ceremony apparently took the theme of classics were the star attendants (the youngling snoob actors, of course. I dont see Slamet Rahardjo, Jajang C. Noer, or Didi Petet wearing more than a suit and a simple elegant dress) dressed copying the royal family. European royal family. I dont know about the rest of you, but i dont like the theme at all. It was unoriginal, half-hearted, and failed to hit the spot. I prefer Rachel Maryam's outfit which was a casual one piece dress than umm.. Titi Kamal's royal-like gown.

In the world where quite literally, everything that happened in the side of this other world could be heard and seen right this instant at the other side of the world, it's rather hard to find an originality in creativity products that tried to entertain. Take the issue of plagiarism in our television network's sinetron. That's old news. But check this one out, i just recently counted how many Dream Theater's song that has been used as a TV program's soundtrack. Panic Attack, Take the Time, and The Spirit Carries On to name a few. And i am more than willing to bet that none of these TV programs had a license to play the song. In my point of view, quite visibly, Indonesian Movie Awards based its presentation concept to the Academy Awards. And, based on what i've seen on TV, that whereas Academy Awards ceremony produced a bright, over-to-top, luxurious grandeur, the Indoneisan Movie Awards felt bland, quiet, and lame. Even though that you really had to count that Academy Awards has been around for 76 years, and this year was Indonesian Movie Awards' first.

To give it a fair measure, the nominees weren't that bad. It seems that the jury has learned form the last year's debacle of Festival Film Indonesia. They had your standard festival's categories, you know, best actor, best actress, best soundtrack, best film, and so forth. But, they also had MTV's style categories, such as best new comer, best soundtrack, best couple and some silly categories such as best singing actor? What was that? To add an insult to injury, we've also had two awards given to some of the major categories. Best, whereas the winner decided by some jury, and Favorite, whereas the winner was chosen by audience's SMS. You got to give it a hand to the producers, they still wanted as much as profit as they could get. I would personally bet that this Indonesian Movie Award won't last long, three years would be my best bet. As soon as the producers realized that they flushed the money down the drain, there'd be no more of this show.

Let's go to the winner. For me, the interesting part of any award ceremony, the real meat of the show, was to hear each and everyone thank-you list from the winner. However, the winner attendance rate was quite low in this show. Kinaryosih, the winner in at least three categories , she couldn't attend the show. Nicholas Saputra was also absent. So was Albert Faxdawer, the winner in one category. Titi Kamal attended the show only because she was also had a responsibility to deliver one of the award category. And after her second win (shared with Kinaryosih as best and favorite couple), we'd wish that she won't show up for the rest of the night. Well, that was not the case unfortunately. And so was Cornelia Agatha. She was one of the actress to deliver one of the category's nominations. Agus Ringgo, the winner of the most favourite new actor showed up just because he was the host (one of four). Also the host slash winner, was Nirina Zubir. One question, how did she got nominated anyway? In short, there's nothing spectacular, nothing that resembles thinking out-of-the-box attidute. All was down by the rules written unofficially in a book called 'How to Make a Boring Award Show'.

To give it one plus point, the video that accompanies each award presentation, that even often ran too long, contains some hillarious shots by Aming. Ironically, the best of these shots were made when Aming crossdressed as a female.

All in all, i'm actually glad that there was actually another Indonesian Film Festival. As with everything else, i've always firmly believed that a quality of something could always be improved when there's a competition. And who knows, maybe with the presence of this award, Film Festival Indonesia would tried to improved its quality in order to reclaim the throne. Because that even though i percieved the award in such a negative attitude, it still beats the last year's FFI by a mile.

Anyway, where was “Realita, Cinta dan Rock 'N Roll”? I loved that film. It certainly better than “Mirror”.