The Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) has opened submissions for Nigeria’s entry to the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Every year this window opens, it reopens a set of questions that Nigeria has never fully answered — about language, about eligibility, about what it means for one of the world’s largest film industries to have never received an Academy Award nomination in the international feature category.
The context this year is sharpened by My Father’s Shadow. Akinola Davies Jr.’s film — the Lagos-set drama about a father and his sons during the 1993 election crisis — represented not Nigeria but the United Kingdom at the 2026 Academy Awards, because its production structure made it a UK submission. A Nigerian story, made by a Nigerian-British director, about one of the most specifically Nigerian moments in the country’s history, carried the British flag to the Oscars. That fact sits at the centre of Nigeria’s Oscar problem: the country’s most internationally celebrated recent film was not eligible to represent Nigeria itself.
The Language Problem
The specific obstacle that has repeatedly tripped Nigeria is the Academy’s rule requiring that a film submitted in the International Feature category have a predominantly non-English soundtrack. Nigeria’s commercial cinema works largely in English — the lingua franca that lets Nollywood reach across the country’s linguistic diversity and into the diaspora and international markets. That commercial strength becomes an Oscar liability. A Nigerian film made in English, however excellent, is ineligible for the category the country is trying to enter.
This has been the recurring disqualification. Nigeria has submitted films before and seen them ruled ineligible or fail to advance precisely because the English-language reality of Nollywood collides with the non-English requirement of the category. The films that clearly qualify — those made predominantly in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or another Nigerian language — are a smaller subset of the industry’s output, and not always the films with the international profile and campaign resources that Oscar contention requires. Nigeria faces a structural mismatch between what its industry produces and what the category will accept.
What It Would Take
For Nigeria to break through, several things would need to align. A film made predominantly in a Nigerian language, of genuine international quality, with the festival profile and campaign infrastructure to compete against the strongest international submissions from countries with decades of Oscar strategy. The pieces exist across the industry but rarely in a single film in a single year. The Yoruba-language epics have the language and increasingly the ambition. The prestige art films have the quality and the festival profile. The alignment of all of it in one eligible, campaign-ready film is what Nigeria has not yet achieved.
The deeper question the submission window raises is whether the Oscar is even the right ambition. My Father’s Shadow reached Cannes, the BAFTAs, and the Academy’s international category as a UK film and did more for the global visibility of Nigerian storytelling than a Nigerian Oscar submission has ever done. The Caméra d’Or that Ben’Imana won for Rwanda at Cannes this year arguably means more for African cinema than an Academy nomination would. Nigeria’s path to international recognition has run through the festival circuit and through co-productions far more successfully than through the Oscar submission process.
Still, the NOSC window is open, and the symbolic weight of a first Nigerian Oscar nomination remains real. RollCallAfrica’s position is that Nigeria should submit its strongest eligible film and campaign for it seriously — while recognising that the country’s genuine arrival on the world stage has already happened, at Cannes and beyond, in ways the Oscar process has been too structurally narrow to capture. The nomination would be a milestone. It would not be the arrival. The arrival is already underway.
— Emeka Eze. RollCallAfrica, Lagos. 2 August 2026. Sources: Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) submission announcements, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences eligibility rules, RollCallAfrica Cannes 2026 coverage.
