By Muhammadu Sabiu
The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences’ Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) stated that no film would be forwarded for the 2023 Oscars.
Nigeria will not be submitting a film to the International Feature Film category of the Oscars for the second consecutive year.
The committee’s chair, Mrs Chineze Anyaene-Abonyi, apologized to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for not being able to locate a film that satisfied the requirements 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.
The 15 members of the committee voted on September 3rd, 2022, and the voting chart was 8, 5, 1, 1, with “No Film is Eligible” receiving the most votes.
“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.
To gain the necessary international exposure and position our films in its acknowledged level of creative debate, she advised filmmakers to become more familiar with Oscar-nominated movies in the International Feature Film (IFF) category.
The movie “The Milkmaid” was submitted in 2020. However, after passing the eligibility test for the first time, the Desmond Ovbiagele-produced film was disqualified because it did not make the category’s initial selection.
The Oscars disqualified Genevieve Nnaji’s “Lionheart” in 2019 for failing to meet the non-English conversation requirement.
