The Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) for the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences has announced that it will not be submitting a movie for the 2023 Oscars, as no Nollywood film passed the eligibility criteria.
No Nigerian Film Eligible For Oscars 2023
The Chairperson of the NOSC, Chineze Anyaene-Abonyi made this known, while also expressing regret that the committee could not find a film suitable for the award.
According to a statement released and signed by the chairperson, the fifteen-member community failed to reach a consensus on three contending titles due to their voting patterns.
An excerpt of the statement reads, “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.”
Just so you know, every year the committee presides over Nigerian submissions, deciding the best fit for the year’s ‘International Feature Film’ category, a category which has been created by the Academy (Oscars) to award films from across the globe.
“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.”
This will however be the second year in a row that Nollywood films will be having the NOSC’s ‘non-eligibility’ verdict, as the committee last submitted an Oscar contender in 2020 with Desmond Obviagele’s ‘The Milkmaid.’
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