A review of Mayur's Oscar-worthy movie quiz
You would think that a fight that breaks out over a piece of paper would be a tough act to beat on Oscars Night, given the throwback to the Will Smith-Chris Rock incident from last year, but Mayur managed to do that with his superbly-crafted movie quiz, Lights! Camera! Question!, fourth of its name. Starting with a sly slide about his dislike of spelling errors, he conducted the event with his usual self-effacing humour and his mumblecore dialogue delivery.
The quiz began – more or less on time – with a prelims set of 20 questions evenly distributed between Indian and international. Several gems shown out from this lot – I particularly liked the 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' poster set, but was personally miffed that Mayur failed to mention a relatively important sidelight to the very first answer. But the biggest cheers came when it turned out that Mayur had successfully Afsosed Doc Shekhar.
The prelims scores were, by and large, surprisingly low – quite clearly, people aren't watching as many movies as they should. Those scores were used to make up the teams in what should have been a relatively balanced manner. But sometimes these things go awry, and there were a few marked discrepancies in team composition.
The main quiz consisted of two rounds of circulating questions punctuated by two written rounds. The revelation of the answers to the first of these was delayed by an interminable wait for a man to streak on stage, but eventually he got his moment in the limelight, short as it might have been. You had to be there.
The second of the written rounds was about movie references in 'Family Guy' episodes. That was fun.
The pounce-and-bounce rounds passed without much incident, except for the aforementioned scrap over a scrap of paper, a misunderstood clue about a Full Metal Jacket (nice question, though), a hidden reference to Spinal Tap that was fun to spot, and the unforgettable experience of William Shatner speaking in Esperanto (another great question). Mayur ended the show with two Connect questions he had whipped up over the interval between rounds, and was much lauded by the enraptured audience.
At the end of the day, Team 6 (or Fight Club, as I like to call it) ended in 6th place. Three teams were bunched quite close together in the middle, but the competition at the top was very close, with 5 points separating the winners and the runners-up.
Two thumbs up to the quiz!
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