The Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) for the Academy Awards has announced the cancellation of its plan towards the country’s participation in the 2023 Oscars saying that no submitted film was eligible.
The Chairperson of NOSC, Chineze Anyaene-Abonyi, who communicated the development to the AMPAS, expressed regret that the committee could not find a film suitable for the award.
“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.
Anyaene-Abonyi said, “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.”
However, she implored 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 is the second year in a row that Nigeria would not be submitting a film for the International Feature Film category of the Oscars, the last submission being The Milkmaid in 2020.
It would be recalled that Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart was first submitted for Oscar consideration by the committee in 2019 but was disqualified by the Academy as it did not meet the language requirement.
