Oscar fever rages on at local movie theaters and on TV

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): The Oscars have all been given out, all the recipients and nominees have walked on to their next projects and the whole Academy Awards brouhaha is dying down. But Oscar fever in Indonesia is not entirely over yet.

Not when the private television station RCTI aired the recorded Academy Awards telecast last Wednesday. Not especially when the local cinema chain is unusually flooded with a good number of Oscar-winning and nominated films.

It looks like people around here are still going to talk about the Oscars for the coming few weeks. And they're not necessarily full of praise about it.

Around here, a lot of flak is directed toward RCTI, the local station that obtained the rights from ABC-TV in the United States to broadcast the show.

RCTI did not air the telecast live, and that's perfectly understandable, given that the show took place on Sunday night, March 26, in Los Angeles, which was Monday morning, March 27 here in Jakarta.

"We don't have our target audience if we air it live in the morning, because most of the people whom we think would like to see it go to work at that time," said Stanny Sibbald, an RCTI spokesperson.

So RCTI did it the way they have always done it. They recorded the show and aired it later in what they call a "delayed broadcast." This is not, after all, the first time RCTI has aired the show. It has taken turns with another television station, SCTV, in broadcasting the program for almost a decade. This year, however, RCTI organized a special live screening at The Hard Rock Cafe for journalists and others, by invitation only.

But once the program hit the Indonesian airwaves on Wednesday night, March 29, criticism was rampant. Almost immediately after the station completed the Oscar broadcast at 10:30 p.m., internet message boards and e-mail chat rooms were deluged with angry remarks about how RCTI had mistreated the show. The most common complaint: the four-hour show has been butchered down to a measly two and a half hours, and that's including commercials.

"It's the speeches," said Arif Hasyim, a young Oscar enthusiast contacted by phone, when asked what aspect of the show he was best looking forward. "Through the acceptance speeches, we get to know actors as their real selves, not necessarily like how we know them in movies. I mean, I don't mind if they take out the Best Documentary award, but they shouldn't cut off the speeches like that. It's a crime they're committing."

"We usually only allocate a two-hour slot for special programs like this," explained Sibbald, "and for this we gave two and a half hours. Besides, we wanted to package the show in a different way and not just air it exactly the way we record it."

That package included television personalities Desy Ratnasari and Farhan hosting the station's presentation of the Oscar telecast, and this was a source of much of the criticism, since the two made inane remarks such as "Denzel Washington did not win because the characters he plays from film to film tend to be the same," and "the actors who won, won because they're so good playing other people, not themselves."

"I don't understand what they were thinking," said Agie Safitri, a film-loving English teacher. "They should have brought in competent movie experts to comment on the awards, and they should have left the show alone, free from commentary and contests."

But Agie and scores of other moviegoers are applauding the way Oscar-recognized films find their way into the local theaters.

"It's certainly not the first time we have seen Oscar- nominated films in our theaters," said film producer Mira Lesmana. "But I've never seen this many, and playing at the same time too."

Three of the films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar are currently playing here: American Beauty, The Green Mile and The Insider; along with The Hurricane, the movie Washington was nominated for.

Gulshan N., from the theater-owner company Camila Internusa Film, revealed that another Best Picture nominee, The Cider House Rules, is on the way, as well as other Oscar favorites: The Talented Mr. Ripley, The End of the Affair, Sleepy Hollow and the film that boasts Hilary Swank's Academy-Award winning performance, Boys Don't Cry.

A veteran film importer, who wishes not to be identified, explained that this current rush of Academy Award winners and nominees to local cinemas is mainly due to the new quota-free policy from the government.

"It used to be," he said," we couldn't bring in more than 80 to 85 films from Europe and America. That's why we had to be really selective. Since 1998, after the quota policy was dismantled, we were able to bring in any number of films, any kind of films. Now, especially with the rupiah steadying against the U.S. dollar, we can get in a large amount of Oscar-quality films."

The success of Life is Beautiful here encouraged him to bring in other non-English language films, such as the Oscar nominee from Iran, Children of Heaven, and the Golden Horse-winning Chinese film, Xiu Xiu.

That means the disheartened Oscar buffs can soon forget their maladies over the Oscar telecast by getting the perfect antidote: going to the local theaters to see the movies the Academy loves.