Nigeria’s Lionheart has been disqualified from the Oscar race. Lionheart is a Nigerian movie which was produced in 2018 by Chinny Onwugbenu. It was directed by star actress Genevieve Nnaji. The groundbreaking movie was acquired by Netflix in September of 2018.
Hopes of international recognition soared when the movie was nominated for the Oscar awards thereby emerging as Nigeria’s first entry into the Oscars. In a turn of events, the film was disqualified for being “largely in English.”
According to the organizers, Lionheart has too much dialogue in English. In a reaction to the disqualification, Genevieve Nnaji took to her twitter handle to say,
“I am the director of Lionheart. This movie represents the way we speak as a Nigerians. This includes English which acts as a bridge between the 500+ languages spoken in our country; thereby making us #OneNigeria.”
Genevieve Nnaji
A twitter user who goes by the ID ‘Ugwunna Ejikem’ said, “Since a decade ago, Oscar stopped movies in that category made predominantly in the English language just like Lionheart. An Israeli movie “The Band” was disqualified in 2007 for the same reason. Y’all slow down on ‘African discrimination’ talk on this issue. Rules are rules.”
Many others have however reacted negatively to the news via various platforms. Famous among them is: Olisa Osega who tweeted,
“Lionheart’s disqualification from the Oscars is a very disgraceful one. And the reason they gave is a shallow one. “
A Nigerian movie shouldn’t have so much English in it” but our official language in Nigeria is English language. What exactly does that mean? BS!”
Olisa Osega
“It’s so unfortunate that the academy disqualified Lionheart from an Oscar nom…it sucks to be unfairly disqualified, wrongfully placed and generally just discarded by the world that was not created by us, to begin with. A very familiar feeling…
Victoria Kimani also tweeted
