Oscars: Nigeria fails to meet eligibility again

The Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) for the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences has announced, that no movie will be submitted for the 2023 Oscars Awards.

This will be the second year in a row, that Nigeria will not be submitting a movie for the International Feature Film category of the Oscars.

The Chairperson, Mrs Chineze Anyaene-Abonyi, who spoke to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), expressed her regret that the committee could not find any movie that met the eligibility criteria for the International Feature Film category.

“Although the committee received three epic films following its call for submissions in August, it turned out that none of them will advance to the next stage owing to the voting patterns of members,” she said.

The voting which took place on the 3rd of September 2022, amongst the 15 members of the committee had a voting chart of 8, 5, 1, 1 with “No Film is Eligible” taking the lead.

“Nigerian films had, no doubt, improved significantly as the awareness of the requirements has since grown among filmmakers, and potentially soon, we just might be bringing this award home in succession,” Anyaene-Abonyi also said.

She asked filmmakers to “get more acquainted with Oscars-nominated films in the IFF category to achieve the needed international recognition and put our films in its acclaimed level of creative discourse.”

In 2020, the movie ‘the milkmaid’ was submitted, despite passing the eligibility test for the first time, the Desmond Ovbiagele-produced movie was cut off after it failed to make the first shortlist in the category.

Also in 2019, Genevieve Nnaji’s “Lionheart” was disqualified by the Oscars for not meeting the non-English dialogue criteria.