The Urian Awards: Observations from a Semi-Starry, Starry Night
Posted by Oggs Cruz on Monday, August 22, 2011 in Astig, Features
It was a blind item coursed through an acceptance speech. Arnel Mardoquio, director of Sheika, received the Urian Best Actress trophy for Fe Gingging Hyde, who was in Dubai and was unable to receive her award.
The Mindanaoan director revealed that his film was then an entry for a local independent film festival and was removed precisely because Hyde was not famous enough to rake in publicists and moviegoers to be interested in the film. For Mardoquio, the Urian prize, like the NETPAC prize he won for the same film during the local independent film festival he was referring to, is sweet retribution. For some of us, Mardoquio’s speech reveals just one of the many concerns of the supposed “indie film” scene. For the rest, which probably consists of majority of movie-going Filipinos, the speech is nothing more than an ignorable anecdote that will do nothing for their hunger only for escapist cinema, whether locally produced or imported.
Ever since the international film community started noticing so-called indie films and bestowing upon them slots in prestigious film festivals and awards, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino quickly took charge in promoting their successes by offering nominations and wins in their annual Urian Awards. It is ostensibly a worthy effort. The films needed to be seen in the Philippines. However, the sad truth is that these films’ existences are kept secret not by some grandiose conspiracy but by simple ignorance. The Manunuri and their much-coveted awards have saved up enough integrity and goodwill over the years to make their decisions a matter of public interest.
It has been more than five years that the Manunuri has been consciously blocking out mainstream efforts from their nominations. However, after films like Lav Diaz’s eleven-hour Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004) and Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis (Service, 2008) and Kinatay (Execution of P, 2009) have been nominated and eventually been awarded Best Picture trophies, the viewership remains the same. Interest to the films that the Manunuri has chosen to be the most representative of the so-called Golden Age in Philippine Cinema is still limited to a pitiful few. Most are still lining up to the next instalment of a random film franchise manufactured hardly with artistry in mind.
It is perhaps futile to rant about independent film viewership vis-a-vis the hidden and well-guarded inutility of the Urian Awards, or any awards for that matter. It is even more futile to dispute the Manunuri’s choices, whether it be for John Sayles’ Amigo, a film which was shot predominantly in the Philippines featuring a cast and crew of Filipino talents and craftsmen but is indisputably a vision of a foreigner, or for Sigfried Barros-Sanchez’s Tsardyer, a film whose possibly noble intentions are mired by undeniable technical maladies, a general lack of taste, and an elementary and quite damning perspective on the conflicts that ail Mindanao. After all, the awards belong to them, the honoured and honourable critics who have mustered their good reputations through academic positions and years of hopefully selfless hard-work for what’s left of the country’s film culture.
I submit however that the awards and whatever intention that plagues the award-givers reluctance to spread the joy to deserving but commercial efforts are dangerous to the film culture I believe we all dearly love. These awards are more than just trophies. They are actually film reviews that inexplicably use overreaching words like “best” and “top,” without the benefit of an ample explanation. While the awards are given with a short explanation in a very academic and nearly impenetrable Filipino, the ultimate effect of singling a group of films without explaining the parameters or the requisites of social impact and relevance is the extremely wrong assumption that only pertinent and socially-important films are good. Quite frankly, this bad education stifles cinema, as it limits cinema’s purposes to journalistic and pseudo-editorial goals, leaving out the truly imaginative, the bravely experimental, and the truthfully entertaining unrewarded and undervalued.
Absent the Urian’s self-appointed goal of championing relevant cinema, the awards themselves are separated celebrations that work best when seen as nothing more than plaques of appreciation instead of recognitions for supposed grandiose contributions to Philippine film culture. That is why the most honest moment of the awards night was not Mardoquio’s feisty but wordy retributive speech or Sid Lucero’s hopefully heartfelt consolation for the little-known workers of cinema but the cute but very sincere impromptu speeches of Lav Diaz’s mother who received for her son two Decade’s best awards. For a film industry that has Hollywood, an uncaring government, piracy, and other ills as its enemies, it is best that its components treat each other as family members rather than as opponents. It is best for its guardians to treat its components as one cohesive whole, rather than an object to be divided by relevance or importance. Maybe then, there will no longer be stars and semi-stars, just films.
Editor’s Note: Oggs Cruz moonlights as a film critic when he isn’t upholding the Philippine constitution as a full time attorney at law. However, we sincerely believe that it’s really the other way around; most especially after you get schooled by his film blog, Lessons from the School of Inattention.
