Ghana will not be represented at the 2018 Oscars, because the Ghana Foreign Language Committee could not nominate any of the films submitted.
The Chairman of the Committee, Professor Linus Abraham announced this in Accra recently.
None of the three films – ‘Children of the Mountain’, ‘Na Me Nim’ and ‘Black Monkey’ – submitted met the requirements for the Foreign Language Oscars which automatically disqualified them from being nominated.
According to Professor Abraham, the committee detected various anomalies with the submissions of all three films, “and so the committee had no 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, Professor Abraham noted that although one movie was outstanding with the potential of being nominated, it 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 its VOD release. The said film fell short of that requirement.
Also, the submitted films failed to use the committee’s standards of submission, which required submitting the films via film freeway as well as 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 year’s Oscars. Among them, Kenya, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Mozambique and South Africa are representing the African continent.