Chineze Anyaene has resigned as the chair of the Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC).
NOSC is the organization recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to choose and submit films from Nigeria for further shortlisting to participate at the annual Oscars.
After weeks of internal dispute, NOSC’s leadership voted in October 2022 to not enter any Nigerian films for the International Feature Film (IFF) prize category of the 2023 Oscars.
This led in a lengthy argument with filmmakers who believed their films had a chance of getting nominated.
Anyaene, the founder of NOSC, has now resigned as chairwoman of the selection committee.
Her move, a press release from NOSC confirms, is coming days after she secured an AMPAS re-approval of NOSC.
The development also comes as Nigeria and the rest of the world prepare for the 96th edition of the Oscars to hold in 2024.
NOSC said the new leadership of the committee will be announced in due course.
On her resignation, Anyaene spoke of her early days as a young filmmaker when she attempted to submit her film for consideration at the Oscars in 2012, only to discover that Nigeria had no constituted committee for submitting.
“This discovery fueled my determination to create and personally finance a committee for Nigerian films to compete at this prestigious level of international cinema,” Anyaene said.
“In recent years, NOSC’s mission evolved from merely submitting films to promoting and fostering the creation of high-quality Nigerian film entries.
“The focus shifted towards encouraging a collaborative effort within the industry, where personal interests were set aside for the greater good of the Nigerian film industry.”
Anyaene constituted NOSC in 2012 and got AMPAS’s nod to screen entries to represent Nigeria in the IFF category.
The committee was re-approved in 2019, at which time it submitted the filmmaker Genevieve Nnaji’s ‘Lionheart’.
‘Lionheart’ was eventually disqualified for not meeting the non-English dialogue criteria.
However, AMPAS later succumb to NOSC’s advocacy for the recognition of Pidgin as a local language in 2020.
This amounted to the acknowledgment of dialogues in Nigerian Pidgin as a non-English fit for the IFF category.
In 2021, Desmond Ovbiagele’s ‘The Milkmaid’ made history as the first Nigerian film to be approved by AMPAS to compete in the IFF category of the 93rd Academy Awards.
The film, however, did not make the final shortlist.
In 2023, due to the internal crisis, NOSC failed to submit an entry for the second consecutive year.
