Ghana’s hope of securing a nomination at the 90th Academy Awards also referred to as the Oscars has been dashed as a committee put in place to present a movie reveal none of the submitted movies met the stringent policies set out by the Oscars.
According to various reports, Ghana Foreign Language Committee, they could not nominate any of the films submitted to them. The Chairman of the Committee, Professor Linus Abraham announced this in Accra.
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The committee found that none of the three (3) films submitted met the submission requirements for the Foreign Language Oscars. That automatically disqualified them from being nominated.
Professor Abraham said the committee detected various anomalies with the submissions of all three films, “and so the committee had not choice but to disqualify them, to preserve the integrity of the committee and of Ghana’s participation in the Oscars.”
Out of the three films submitted to the Committees Secretariat, Professor Abraham noted that one stood out, with the potential of being nominated; but it unfortunately did not meet the Academy’s release requirements.
Any film submitted must have first been released in its country of origin, theatrically for seven consecutive days, before it’s VOD release. The film did not meet that requirement.
The submitted films also failed to use the committee’s standards of submission, which required submitting the films via film freeway and also supplying the committee with 20 DVD copies.
The Oscars have a very strict regime for submission of films. The Foreign Language Selection Committee held a workshop in Ghana in June 2017 with resource persons who took filmmakers through the submission process. Unfortunately, there was a dismal representation of active Ghanaian filmmakers at the workshop. This underscored the multiple mistakes made by the filmmakers who submitted their films.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the list of foreign language films selected for next years Oscars. Among them, Kenya, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Mozambique and South Africa are representing the African continent.
The 90th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will honor the best films of 2017 and will take place on March 4, 2018, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.
The awards ceremony will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
