The organisers of the annual Ghana Movie Awards which aims to award excellence in Ghana’s struggling movie industry released their nomination list for the 2015 edition yesterday—opening a wormhole of social media criticisms, mostly from leading industry persons.
Even before the nominations, actress/producer-Yvonne Nelson had taken an uncomfortable position, saying, it would be wrong if the organisers nominate Netflix’s latest movie-Beasts of No Nation to compete with the local Ghanaian movies.
Yvonne Nelson grounded her objection in budget—arguing that, ‘Beasts of No Nation’ was shot on about 6 million dollars budget, an amount which if we sum up the budget of all the movies shot in Ghana this year would still be far greater than them.
For the first time in a long time, I somewhat agree with Yvonne Nelson’s objection of Beasts of No Nation’s inclusion in the 2015 Ghana Movie Awards, albeit I disapprove of this based on different set of arguments.
I’ve followed ‘Beasts of No Nation’ from the time it was shot in Ghana to today—my blog (GhanaCelebrities.Com) was the platform the ‘production’ house contacted to address a disagreement certain key industry players had with them when they visited Ghana for the shoot.
And I’ve reviewed the movie; so I am well aware of its excellence and weakness—and I’ve taken part in the various conversations surrounding the supposition that the movie perpetuates Hollywood’s unfair perception of Africa as a jungle full of ‘sadistic killers’.
There’s no squabble about the fact that ‘Beasts of No Nation’ is not a Ghanaian movie—but it has strong ties with Ghana. The confusion surrounding ‘Beasts of No Nation’ goes beyond this argument: its Oscars’ fate is shaky based on the fact that the movie broke Oscar’s 90 days exclusivity release rule when it was released on Netflix.
But this is a conversation for a different time. All I am trying to say at this stage is that, ‘Beasts of No Nation’ cuts across industries and it adopted mixed release strategies, making it difficult to place it in a single well defined box. There is also the issue of where the movie belongs; Hollywood, Independent or not.