The prestige of the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA) undoubtedly needs no introduction. No other award platform on the continent has been more committed to celebrating and recognising the efforts and achievements of Africans within the African film and television industry. In the last few years, the cultural significance of the AMVCA has witnessed even more meteoric growth. This explains why, arguably more than before, creatives and players within the industry have shown a renewed eagerness to be recognised by them. This longing also trickles down to audiences and fan communities, many of whom desire to see their favourites clinch one or two or maybe more recognition at this level. Thus, the question of how this recognition is determined—who gets nominated, who wins and what metrics shape these outcomes — has become more critical.
The AMVCA began in 2013. At the time, the AMVCA was designed as a populist, vote-based system to ensure that viewers could effectively have a say in the celebration of their icons and to drive commercial audience engagement. Before the AMVCA, the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA), which was in existence, was based on academy juries. The AMVCA’s approach was, in a way, targeted towards achieving commercial and cultural success by giving viewers and the audience the chance to determine their favourite winners. However, not all categories were left to the decision of viewers.
In the inaugural 2013 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards, the non-voting categories consisted primarily of technical, craft, and behind-the-scenes disciplines. These were Best Movie Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Art Director, Best Costume Designer, Best Lighting Designer, Best Picture Editor, Best Sound Editor, and Best Make-Up Artist. During this debut edition, all performance and acting honours were determined entirely by public voting.
Ahead of its 10th edition in 2024, the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA) significantly restructured its award system. The platform reduced the number of audience-voted categories, retaining only nine public-voting categories alongside sixteen non-voting categories determined exclusively by the jury. Most notably, the highly coveted acting categories — Best Lead Actor, Best Lead Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress — were removed from audience voting entirely and placed under the sole jurisdiction of the AMVCA jury.
According to Busola Tejumola, MultiChoice Executive Head of Content, the reassessment of the categories is to keep up with global standards. The shift was “a move to ensure the awards truly recognised “achievements in the industry.” For the 11th edition in 2025, the non-voting segment increased to include 18 jury-decided honours out of 27 total competitive categories. And in 2026, the AMVCA featured 18 jury-voting categories alongside 11 public-voted categories and 3 special honours.
For years, especially as the award platform gained more prominence, the AMVCA’s audience-driven structure attracted criticism from sections of the industry who had the strong opinion that popularity often overshadowed artistic and technical excellence. In several instances, performances and productions widely regarded by critics and filmmakers as superior appeared to lose out to nominees backed by stronger fan mobilisation and social media influence.
The 2023 AMVCA Best Actor in a Drama category brought about one of the most intense debates in Nollywood history when Tobi Bakre won the award for his role in Brotherhood, defeating Chidi Mokeme, who played the widely acclaimed character “Scar” in Shanty Town. Tobi was an alumnus of the popular Big Brother Naija with a strong followership base. Amongst many, opinions are heavily divided, but those on the side of Mokeme have argued that he (Mokeme) had delivered a more cinematic performance than Tobi’s. The underlying concern was simply, for an award platform that sought to recognise and give plaudits to excellence, what adjudicatory system is more effective in determining artistic excellence?
Indeed, left entirely to fanbases, there will almost always be an uneven playing field among nominees. Actors do not command followership and fan loyalty on the same scale, and followership is not particularly driven by artistic merit. This thus became a contradiction at the heart of the AMVCA’s identity that needed an answer — the expansion of the jury-decided categories.
More importantly, conversations among viewers themselves have rarely inspired confidence in the public’s ability to determine artistic excellence in any rigorous sense. At best, discourse surrounding performances, films, and nominations has often been insipid; at worst, it has been driven by sentiment, fan loyalty, online aggression, and a deeply shallow understanding of cinematic craft. Nuanced discussions about screenwriting, character embodiment, cinematography, pacing, or directorial vision are frequently drowned out by celebrity attachment and social media momentum. Under such conditions, the pursuit of excellence through a heavily fan-determined system was always going to be difficult, if not fundamentally compromised.
Just as Bukola noted ahead of the 10th edition of the AMVCA, there is also the growing desire for the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards to model after global standards of institutional recognition. Internationally respected award bodies, such as the Academy Awards and the BAFTA Awards, both regarded among the most prestigious institutions for recognising cinematic achievement, place major performance and technical categories under the assessment of professional juries and academy voters. To really become the “African Oscars” that AMVCA aspires towards, the body appears to understand the need to prioritise technical excellence and institutional credibility over anything else.
As was partly evident at the AMVCA, the cinematic industry across Africa and particularly Nigeria cannot shy away from the consequential impact of this shift. For a while, popular discourse (in relation to Nigerian Cinema) has been rife with criticisms about its declining quality. Critics and film journalists have pointed it out, much to the annoyance and dismissal of Nigerian actors and filmmakers, that Nollywood needs a seismic reset and improvement in relation to the kind of stories it tells, the way those stories are told, the level of intentionality behind productions, as well as the industry’s overall commitment to technical and artistic excellence. Watching a large chunk of Nollywood movies in recent times — especially those that have the loyalty of very large fan bases — has been an exercise in recycling familiar tastes. Many others, burdened by weak writing and a dearth of creative ambition, have simply been sitting through chores. With an informed, merit-based system, filmmakers and actors may just be forced to do the (hard) work they have been avoiding for a long time.
This commitment to awarding excellence, which increasingly appears to be taking root at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards, leaves emerging actors and independent productions with much to be hopeful about. Indie filmmakers and rising actors will likely stand a fairer chance of being recognised for the strength of their craft without losing on the altar of commercial strength. A more merit-oriented system creates room for artistically ambitious films to compete on more equal terms within Nollywood’s growing award culture — so long as the selection body remains fair and just.
The AMVCA now finds itself at an institution-defining crossroads. It is caught between its attempts to present itself as a credible authority capable of adjudicating what cinematic excellence is and is not, and its foundational identity as a largely populist, audience-driven platform built on viewer participation and mass engagement. Its success will depend on how it can walk between these fields without caving. Whatever AMVCA does with future iterations, the body must recognise that the fate of African and Nigerian Cinema rests on its decisions.
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