Tyranny of the small-screen: a reading of Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart

This paper analyzes the critical reception and disqualification of Genevieve Nnaji’s film, Lionheart (2018), at the 92nd Academy Awards. It examines the tension between the film’s nomination by the Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) and its rejection at the global Oscar platform. Deriving its theoretical framework from Peter Harcourt’s three-tier model of film appreciation which evaluates films based on specific artistic/aesthetic criteria, the paper is a close reading of Lionheart, situating the film’s text and the director’s work against the cinematic profile of Nollywood and juxtaposing these with global cinema practice. The major finding is that while Nnaji’s Lionheart justified the NOSC’s decision by competently conveying the Nigerian experience of cinema, the film remained too circumscribed by its local Nollywood technical conventions to have made any significant impact on a world-class cinematic stage like the Oscars. The paper recommends that Nigerian filmmakers need more informed awareness of the comparative limitations of their choice narrative and narration formats in order to enhance their competitiveness on global cinema praxis.