A glittering celebration of Bollywood’s silver screen achievements was held in Mumbai last Sunday. It was watched by millions of fans the world over on their home television screens.

The popular annual celebration and awards ceremony dubbed Star Screen Awards 2017 honoured commercially successful and critically acclaimed movies and creative artistic performances for the year gone by.

Leading personalities of the Indian world of cinema like Salman Khan, Varurn Dhawan, Tiger Sharoff, Madhuri Dixit and Ileana D’Cruz graced the occasion. The award ceremony saw some colourful and breath taking performances by Bollywood stars.

Nominations for the awards had a mix of critics and popular choices. There were big banner commercially successful movies and small films that won many hearts. The announcement of winners for 2017 was a happy and most welcome departure from previous years where most of the facilitations have been shared by conventional lot of the Indian cinema.

The Best Actor of the Year trophy on critics’ choice went to Rajkumar Rao a relatively new comer for a true to life performance in Newton. He was also declared the Best Supporting actor in Baeilly Ki Barfi. Irfan Khan was hailed and voted the Best Actor on popular choice.

OFFBEAT MOVIE

The Best Actress award went to Vidya Balan for her role as a radio presenter in Tumhari Sulu and Konkana Sen Sharma on critics’ choice for Lipstick under my Burkha.

The Amir Khan movie Dangal got Nitesh Tiwari the facilitation of Best Director as the movie also bagged honors for music, lyrics and editing. Master crooner Arijit Singh still remains the Best Singer for his mesmerising vocals in Raees and Jagga Jasoos. Members of the film fraternity who excelled in costume and Story writing were also recognised.

I was happy to see Newton an offbeat movie, a political satire that refrains from taking sides being selected in the winners list. The movie raises bold questions on the importance of an electoral system that India is proud of. Its World Premiere in the Forum Section of 67th Berlin International Film Festival was also hailed.