Shah Rukh Khan tripped over the hem of his velvet jacket while walking onto the carpet and everybody pretended not to see it, which is the most accurate way to begin talking about the Star Screen Awards 2017 because the entire evening operated on a collective agreement to ignore whatever was awkward, frayed, or mildly embarrassing in plain sight. If I'm honest, nobody really watches these things for the awards themselves anyway since the envelopes contain the names of whoever showed up and stayed until midnight to collect a piece of engraved brass. Yet there is a strange, hypnotic rhythm to how these televised ceremonies grind forward through sheer star wattage and aggressively upbeat tracks pumped into a drafty suburban arena where the air conditioning never quite reaches the front rows.

The pacing of the broadcast felt less like a carefully edited television special and more like a high-budget hostage situation managed by producers who genuinely panicked whenever the applause dipped below a roar. Direction duties rotated among several people who clearly hadn't spoken to each other about lighting palettes or camera angles, resulting in a jarring visual whiplash where one segment looked like a glossy car commercial shot in high-definition digital monochrome while the immediate next five minutes returned to the flat, blown-out overhead fluorescents typical of local cable access. Salman Khan looked bored during his own intro package, staring off into the wings with the unmistakable glaze of a man calculating how many minutes of mandatory stage time stood between him and his private trailer.

There was a supporting actor who kept appearing in the audience reaction shots with the exact same look of stunned disbelief whether Alia Bhatt was winning for Udta Punjab or the hosts were making a tired joke about airplane food, and after the fourth time it happened it became the only thing worth watching. These broadcasts have a long history of flattening the genuine eccentricities of the Hindi film industry into a homogenized product designed for families eating dinner in Uttar Pradesh and corporate sponsors checking their watches from the VIP balconies. You can trace a direct line from the chaotic, wildly unpredictable live telecasts of the nineties through to this hyper-sanitized 2017 iteration where every emotional beat is telegraphed months in advance by public relations teams and digital content managers.

Performances on the stage ranged from the kinetic, bone-rattling precision of Varun Dhawan throwing himself across a platform of backup dancers to various senior actors standing still in expensive blazers while fire cannons went off behind them to mask the absence of choreography. It reminded me of watching Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on a cracked laptop screen while someone vacuumed the next room over, lacking any sense of spatial grounding or acoustic warmth. The sound mixing was particularly atrocious, dropping the volume of the live orchestra right when a brass section hit its stride because some floor manager forgot to cue the audio board in time.

We are told year after year that these events capture the beating pulse of popular culture, but mostly they capture the exhaustion of a massive machine trying to maintain its own momentum long after the fuel has gone stale. When Manoj Bajpayee won for Aligarh, the auditorium gave him a real, unscripted ovation that felt heavy and deserved, cutting through the manufactured hype for about forty seconds before a host immediately bounded back onto the stage to crack a pun about Karan Johar’s sweaters. That whiplash between actual artistic merit and commercial obligation is the defining characteristic of modern Bollywood movies, where a tiny, brilliant performance by a character actor is immediately flanked by four minutes of sponsored dance numbers promoting a brand of motorcycle.

There is a distinct kind of numbness that sets in around the third hour when the technical categories are rushed through in thirty seconds flat while a sound recordist who spent four months in a freezing Himalayan valley tries to accept a statuette over the intro chords of a chart-topping item song. The cameras would cut wide to show vast swathes of empty folding chairs in the back rows where exhausted crew members had abandoned ship hours ago, leaving behind crumpled water bottles and discarded press releases. You can sense the quiet desperation in the backstage green rooms where exhausted makeup artists fix hair that has already survived three costume changes and four rounds of artificial fog.

Some of the presenters were reading their cue cards with such visible reluctance that they might as well have been reciting ingredient lists from shampoo bottles, especially when forced to deliver jokes written by committee months prior. It’s a small thing, but the graphics package used for the nominees looked like it had been whipped up in twenty minutes using a standard template from a free editing software bundle, featuring floating gold particles that stuttered every time the frame rate dropped. Hindi cinema deserves better packaging for its annual self-celebration, or at least a broadcast team that knows how to frame a wide shot without catching half a crane rig in the upper left corner of the lens.

As the confetti finally dropped from the ceiling—half of it landing in the hair of a bewildered sound engineer who had no idea he was on camera—the credits rolled over a chaotic montage of winners waving awkwardly with plastic trophies that probably went straight into the back of a waiting Mercedes outside. Nobody looked changed by the experience, least of all the audience at home flipping through channels looking for a cricket match.