Get ready for a new kind of Bolly high. There's another songfest besides Moulin Rouge that's up for an Oscar this year. But best foreign film candidate Lagaan isn't a product of Hollywood. It comes from Bollywood, the slang term for India's prolific film industry that pumps out up to 800 features each year, almost all of them musicals. Though both films are set in the same era, the outdoor epic is miles away from Moulin Rouge's flashy, trashy take on tragic love in a Paris cabaret. Indian villagers in 1893 try to avoid paying an oppressive tariff (lagaan is Hindi for "land tax") by challenging British colonists to a game of cricket. The match takes up about an hour of Lagaan's 3-hour, 42-minute running time, but there is room for six song-and-dance numbers, two love triangles, religious rituals, political intrigue and many pleas for rain to quench the parched earth.

Lagaan, the most expensive Bollywood musical ever with a budget of nearly $6 million,
opened in June and was the top-grossing film in India last year at $15 million. It came out at the same time in North American specialty theaters, and its debut ranked a respectable 15th for overall grosses.

But if its star/producer has his way, Lagaan may be the first Bollywood musical to cross over to non-ethnic audiences in the West. Says Aamir Khan, 36, who has been a top actor in his native land for more than a decade: "I would like an opportunity for American and European audiences to see mainstream Indian cinema in its pure form. We
showed it at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in August for an audience of 8,000. They freaked on it. They were dancing in the aisles."

Once India selected Lagaan as its Oscar entry, Khan and Lagaan's director, Ashutosh Gowariker, took it upon themselves to go to Los Angeles to spread the word to snare a nomination. "We just started showing it to whoever we could, even the hotel staff."
Lagaan found at least one celebrity supporter. Moulin Rouge's Baz Luhrmann, who borrows freely and often from Bollywood traditions, raves about Lagaan's poetic treatment of its dusty terrain and describes it as "David Lean meets Busby Berkeley."
Now that Sony Classics - the distributor of last year's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - is putting its marketing muscle behind Lagaan, it just may have a chance.
Says co-president Michael Barker: "Watching it on a big screen is like going to a big party, like Dr. Zhivago and The Sound of Music put into a blender." The company plans to re-release the movie on May 10.

The film's fate, however, hinges on the gold statuette. Winning would mean wrestling the award away from the favorites, France's Amélie and Bosnia-Herzegovina's No Man's Land. That, says Gitesh Pandya of boxoffice guru.com, "could open the door to a wider acceptance of Bollywood."

It helps that hints of Bolly already are in the air. Ghost World, the caustic coming-of-age
comedy up for an adapted screenplay Oscar, opens with a hip-shaking sequence from an obscure 1965 release, Gumnaam.

Other Bolly bits: Indian director Mira Nair weaves essences of Bollywood into the current Monsoon Wedding. In The Guru, a Heather Graham comedy due in fall, a Bollywood-style dance number is done to You're the One That I Want from Grease. Andrew Lloyd Webber's next stage production is the Bollywood-inspired Bombay Dreams. Ultimately, what Khan would like Western audiences to take from Lagaan is "the triumph of human spirit, the underdog achieving the impossible."

Sounds a lot like his own mission.