The 12th AMVCA (Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards) begins tomorrow, May 9, 2026, at the Eko Hotel and Suites in Lagos. At Nollycritic, we have spent the better part of this cycle watching and reviewing, debating several nominations. What follows is not a mere list.
It is the result of deliberate editorial conversation, shaped by our reviews, our ratings, and our understanding of what great African cinema looks and feels like. These are our predictions, and our reasons for them.
BEST MOVIE
Nominees: Gingerrr / The Herd / My Father’s Shadow / 3 Cold Dishes / The Serpent’s Gift / Behind The Scenes
Let us start by being honest about the films in this category that we feel should not be here.
3 Cold Dishes is one of them. We understand why the nomination happened. The film carries a real sense of ambition, a pan-African revenge story that stretched production across multiple countries and brought a genuinely rare continental scope to its storytelling. That is worth something. But ambition and scale are not the same as craft, and as we noted in our review, the film is weighed down by choppy pacing, uneven performances, and a framing device that keeps undercutting the emotional weight it is trying to build. A film can travel far and still not arrive anywhere meaningful. That is the 3 Cold Dishes situation.
Behind The Scenes is a different kind of case, and we want to be fair about it. Funke Akindele’s December 2025 release was the defining cultural event of the festive season. It grossed over 2.1 billion naira and kept conversations going well into the new year. Its nomination makes complete sense because the AMVCA has always paid attention to popular sentiment, and this is after all the Viewers’ Choice Awards. Akindele’s brand of accessible, emotionally instructive filmmaking has a real and devoted audience, and that matters. But as we wrote in our review, Behind The Scenes is a film that tells you everything rather than trusting you to feel it. It is commercially confident and well-meaning, but creatively cautious. There is dignity in crowd-pleasing cinema. It is just that Best Movie requires more than that against this field.
The Herd is the film that gives our eventual pick its strongest competition. Daniel Etim Effiong’s directorial debut was among the most discussed films of 2025, and understandably so. It was urgent and timely. It holds a mirror to one of Nigeria’s most painful realities, and it does so without flinching. Audiences responded with real emotion, and the film’s arrival on Netflix only widened its reach. But as we observed in our review, The Herd takes on more threads than it can fully manage. Secondary characters lose their footing when the film needs them most. There is tremendous intention in this film. The problem is that intention without complete execution leaves gaps that a Best Movie contender cannot carry.
And then there is My Father’s Shadow. Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature is the kind of film that does not need to announce itself. Shot on 16mm Kodak film stock and set during the political tension of 1993 Lagos, it is a quiet, deeply observant work that watches a father’s world through the eyes of two young boys. Every choice is deliberate. The grain of the image. The low camera angles that make adults loom with the kind of authority children naturally assign them. The way the tremors of the Abiola election period are felt in the body before the mind can name them. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, earned Nigeria its first BAFTA for a Nigerian production, and received a Camera d’Or Special Mention. It is the most celebrated Nigerian film in recent memory. More than that, it achieves something rare: it tells a specific Nigerian story with such honesty that the whole world can feel it.
The AMVCA has been evolving its standards, and this year, with Joke Silva serving as Head Judge, we believe the jury will reward what we know to be true. My Father’s Shadow is the best film in this category. It is also among the finest Nigerian films ever made.
Our Prediction: My Father’s Shadow
BEST DIRECTOR
Nominees: Akinola Davies Jr. / Tunde Kelani / James Kalu Omokwe / Daniel Etim Effiong / Yemi Morafa / Asurf Amuwa Oluseyi
At its most essential, directing is the art of making every decision serve a single vision. A great director is not simply the person who calls action. They are the controlling intelligence behind tone, pacing, visual grammar, and performance. They are the reason a film feels like one coherent thing rather than a collection of well-made parts.
By that measure, this category has more competition than it might first appear.
Tunde Kelani’s Cordelia demonstrates something genuinely rare in Nigerian cinema: tonal precision. At 77, Kelani remains one of the industry’s most disciplined minds, and his adaptation of Femi Osofisan’s novella moves with the deliberateness of a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants to say. There is no drift and no distraction.
His choice to approach the political atmosphere of 1990s Nigeria through intimation is a real directorial decision. It reflects a filmmaker who understands that ordinary life under military rule is built on quiet, accumulating dread, not loud drama. We noted this in our review of the film. Kelani’s precision is the strongest argument in his favour here.
Daniel Etim Effiong‘s nomination for The Herd represents a real achievement for a feature debut. His use of contrasting visual languages, stable and composed for safety, handheld and urgent for captivity, shows a director who thinks in images.
The fact that he carried the lead acting role while also directing an ensemble of this size speaks to formidable organisational intelligence. But we felt the direction could have been stronger overall. There were moments where the weight of too many storylines became visible on screen, where the editorial judgment needed to tighten things up was not quite there. There was a stronger film inside The Herd that needed a firmer directorial hand to fully pull it out.
Yemi Morafa’s nine nominations for Gingerrr have been one of the more surprising developments of this nominations cycle. We reviewed Gingerrr and our position was clear: the film did not live up to its own marketing (what was expected). The tonal confusion, a heist comedy that never quite decided what it was, is a directorial issue. When a film with this much commercial energy collapses in its third act, the vision at the centre did not hold.
Akinola Davies Jr.’s work on My Father’s Shadow is historic, and we mean that without exaggeration. Davies spent over a year in pre-production with cinematographer Jermaine Edwards, building a visual grammar so precise that by the time cameras rolled, every frame had a reason to exist. His camera observes from a child’s perspective, literally and emotionally. He drew from the Egbo brothers, who are real siblings, a naturalism that feels less like performance than lived experience. From Sope Dirisu, he coaxed a performance of extraordinary restraint, a man carrying the full weight of a country’s political violence without ever letting it tip into melodrama. This is the work of a director who understands that cinema is not about showing everything. It is about choosing what to reveal, and when, and how.
Our Prediction: Akinola Davies Jr. — My Father’s Shadow
AMVCA BEST LEAD ACTOR
Nominated: Mike Ezuruonye / Lateef Adedimeji / William Benson / Kanayo O. Kanayo / Uzor Arukwe / Wale Ojo / Femi Branch / Khumbuza Meyiwa
A few quick notes on the shape of this category. We did not see Bet I Love You, so we cannot speak to Khumbuza Meyiwa’s work. For Femi Branch in Red Circle, our reading of the film is that the lead belongs to the actress at the centre of that story. Branch’s character functions as a supporting role, and his placement in the Best Lead Actor category reflects a misreading of the film’s structure. Similarly, Wale Ojo in 3 Cold Dishes delivered one of that film’s more interesting performances, but his character sits somewhere between supporting and minor. It is a compelling piece of work inside a film that does not support it well enough to make this a genuine lead actor conversation.
Kanayo O. Kanayo in Grandpa Must Obey is genuinely good. His Akachi is warm, stubborn, grief-laden, and layered in the way that only comes from decades of lived craft. You can feel the humour and the heartache at the same time. He was in our serious consideration right up until we made our final call.
But William Benson is the name that belongs here. Efe Efemini in To Kill A Monkey is a character designed to be understood, not admired. He is a man worn down by systemic failure, making moral compromises that the audience can follow even when they cannot fully approve. What Benson does is refuse to perform victimhood. He does not ask for sympathy. He asks for understanding, which is a far harder thing to give. As we observed in our review, Benson brings over three decades of theatre experience to this role, and it shows not in overstatement but in precision. His Efe knows when to speak and when silence is the better choice. He knows what silence carries.
The moment of breakdown after the season’s most devastating event is the kind of acting that stays with you, not because it is loud, but because it is so quietly true. The competition between Benson and Kanayo is real, and we hold both in high regard. But for the weight of the performance, the complexity of the moral journey, and what it means to finally see a theatre veteran of this calibre get his mainstream moment, William Benson is our pick.
Our prediction: William Benson
AMVCA BEST LEAD ACTRESS
Nominated: Linda Ejiofor / Bimbo Akintola / Ifeoma Fafunwa / Ariyike Owolagba / Sola Sobowale / Scarlet Gomez / Genoveva Umeh / Gloria Anozie-Young
We did not see Mother of the Brides, so we will not pretend to have an opinion on Gloria Anozie-Young’s work in it. What we can say is that the eight women assembled in this category represent one of the most genuinely competitive Best Lead Actress races the AMVCA has ever put together.
Let us work through the field honestly.
Scarlet Gomez anchors a film that grossed over 2.1 billion naira. Her performance in Behind The Scenes carries the film’s emotional current and does the job it needs to do. But as we noted in our review, the screenplay does not challenge her. Everything is written to be clearly understood, and nothing asks her to communicate beyond what the scene has already made obvious. The performance is as strong as the writing allows it to be.
Genoveva Umeh in The Herd delivered what our review described as a silent yet very loud performance. Her Derin communicates almost entirely through physical stillness and expression rather than dialogue. It is genuinely impressive work. There is, however, a real critical question about whether Derin is the structural lead of The Herd, or whether the film’s gravitational centre gradually moves toward Daniel Etim Effiong’s Gosi and Linda Ejiofor’s Adamma on the outside. Umeh’s performance is excellent. The category argument is just a bit less clear-cut.
Bimbo Akintola as Inspector Mo in To Kill A Monkey is among the most layered individual performances across this entire nominations cycle. Her portrayal of a grieving, PTSD-carrying investigator is rigorous and unflinching. Linda Ejiofor in The Serpent’s Gift brings exactly the right combination of steel and fragility to a widow navigating grief and inheritance warfare.
Sola Sobowale in Her Excellency is commanding, as she almost always is. Ariyike Owolagba in Something About The Briggs gave a performance we praised for its balance of vulnerability and quiet, measured frustration.
And yet we go to Ifeoma Fafunwa. Because what she does in The Lost Days is not simply a good performance. It is a revelatory one. Fafunwa is not an actress by profession or training. She is one of Nigeria’s most celebrated playwrights and theatre directors, the creative force behind HEAR WORD!, one of the most important theatrical works in Nigerian recent history. To arrive on screen for the first time at this point in a distinguished career, and to do so with this much grace and precision, is extraordinary. Her Chisom communicates through restraint.
Glances held a beat too long. Laughter that almost catches in the throat. A woman sitting quietly with the weight of time she cannot get back. There is a scene near a lake between Chisom and Kolawole that is among the most beautiful and quietly heartbreaking screen moments of the year. The film’s second half lets her down.
The kidnapping subplot pulls the story away from what it should have been about. But what Fafunwa delivers in the time the film gives her goes beyond what the script asks. We believe the AMVCA should recognise this. To let this screen debut pass without acknowledgement would be one of the ceremony’s real missed opportunities.
Our Prediction: Ifeoma Fafunwa — The Lost Days
AMVCA BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Nominated: Simileoluwa Hassan / Lateef Adedimeji / Gabriel Afolayan / Bucci Franklin / Femi Adebayo / Femi Branch / Uzor Arukwe
We did not cover The Yard, so we cannot speak to Simileoluwa Hassan’s performance. We also did not see Agesinkole 2, which puts Femi Adebayo’s work there outside our scope.
What we can say about Lateef Adedimeji in Gingerrr: he was, alongside a few others, one of the reasons the film remained watchable. Our review of Gingerrr was pointed, and we stand by it. But Adedimeji held his ground with real dignity through the production’s chaos, and that speaks to his talent. He gets that credit. Talent in service of a compromised project, however, is a different thing from a performance that reshapes an entire series from the inside.
Uzor Arukwe in Behind The Scenes played a warm and generous supporting friend. The character simply does not carry the kind of dramatic weight that this category should be recognising. Gabriel Afolayan in Colours of Fire and Femi Branch in Red Circle are performances we hold in reasonable regard. Neither reaches the level of what Bucci Franklin did.
Oboz is one of the great Nollywood characters of the decade. Franklin built him from the ground up, and we mean that in the most literal sense. By his own account, he stopped grooming from March through to August, letting his hair and nails grow as part of inhabiting a man who lives entirely outside the codes of polite society. His Bini cadence was precise. His physical presence commanded every scene he was in. What makes Oboz extraordinary is that he is not written or played as a villain in the flat sense. He is a fully formed person, capable of warmth and menace in the same moment.
He is the kind of man who can clear your debts and make a problem disappear in the same week, and Franklin plays both sides of that without flinching. His final scenes, as the reality of betrayal settles in, land hard precisely because the series has spent so long making you genuinely understand him. Hands down, one of the best performances we saw last year.
Our Prediction: Bucci Franklin — To Kill A Monkey
AMVCA BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Nominated: Linda Ejiofor / Olamide Kidbaby / Bisola Aiyeola / Sola Sobowale (The Covenant) / Nadia Dutch / Amal Umar / Juliebrenda Nyambura / Funke Akindele
Before we go through the field, there is a structural point worth making. Sola Sobowale’s nomination here is for The Covenant Series, which makes it the only television series cited in what is otherwise a film-facing category. Other AMVCA categories, including Best Writing, draw an explicit line between movie and television. This category does not, and that inconsistency is real. We will focus our analysis on the feature-length performances in the field and leave Sobowale’s series work to the side.
Bisola Aiyeola in Gingerrr is one of those performers who can carry a scene regardless of what is happening around her. We were candid in our review of Gingerrr, but we noted Aiyeola’s presence as one of the film’s genuine strengths. Even so, the performance did not stand out to us as the kind of work this category should be rewarding at its highest level. Funke Akindele in Behind The Scenes is an interesting case.
She produced and directed and starred in the film, which is an enormous undertaking. But as a performance, our review observed that the character demands a particular kind of menace that her established screen persona works against. Olamide Kidbaby in Oversabi Aunty has won real audience affection. This category, though, asks for something more than that.
Which brings us to the two women from The Herd: Linda Ejiofor and Amal Umar.
Linda Ejiofor’s Adamma is a performance of real layered strength. Her journey on the outside, dealing with an uncooperative bank, her husband’s financial secrets, and in-laws who use her Osu status as leverage to demand a divorce at her most desperate moment, carries the full weight of the film’s social argument. It is a role that works on multiple registers at once, and Ejiofor handles every one of them. She is nominated in both this category and in Best Lead Actress for The Serpent’s Gift, which says everything about how much ground she has covered this cycle.
And yet we go to Amal Umar. This is not a slight against Ejiofor. It is a recognition of what Umar’s Habiba actually is. She is not a widely recognised name. She does not carry the visibility that Ejiofor carries or the star power of an Aiyeola. What she carries is a performance of genuine depth and restraint. Habiba lives inside the bandits’ camp, sitting in an uncomfortable space between captor and captive, between power and vulnerability. Her arc is the film’s most subtle, it is also the most quietly devastating.
She carries the central argument of The Herd, about what desperation does to people and the moral erosion that follows, better than almost any other character in the film. We are genuinely rooting for both women from this production. But if we must name one, we name the one who might not otherwise get her flowers.
Our Prediction: Amal Umar — The Herd
AMVCA BEST WRITING (MOVIE)
Nominated: Lani Aisida (The Herd) / Wale Davies (My Father’s Shadow) / Ikenna Okpara (Blackout) / Xavier Ighorodje (Gingerrr) / Tomi Adesina (3 Cold Dishes) / Isaac Ayodeji (Suky)
We will be direct: Gingerrr should not be in this category. Our review was clear about where the screenplay falls short, from the meandering dialogue to the inability to sustain a tonal identity to the collapse in the third act. A screenplay that cannot hold its story together has no business competing for a writing award, regardless of how well the film performed at the box office. 3 Cold Dishes has a related problem. The writing engages real and important themes, trafficking, gender, agency, but never builds the structural or emotional architecture to honour them. As for Suky, it did not produce enough critical discussion for us to make a strong case either way.
The real conversation in this category is between three films: The Herd, My Father’s Shadow, and Blackout.
Lani Aisida’s screenplay for The Herd is genuinely ambitious. The decision to build a kidnapping thriller around not just the captives but the entire ecosystem of desperation surrounding them, the families, the bandits, the failing institutions, is bold structural thinking. Our hesitation is about the execution in the second half, where the screenplay’s architecture did not fully support what it was trying to do. It is an issue that sits somewhere between writing and direction, but the gaps are visible.
Wale Davies’ My Father’s Shadow is exquisite writing. The restraint required to tell this story, to communicate an entire nation’s political crisis through the limited understanding of two young boys, is a rare and demanding kind of craft. The film earns every emotional moment through implication and through what its characters do not say. In a different year, this nomination might be untouchable.
But we are going to Blackout. We rated it among the best Nollywood films released in cinemas in 2025, and we stand by that call. Written by Ikenna Okpara, the screenplay follows this premise: a woman waking up to a life she does not recognise, is deceptively simple. Beneath it is a screenplay that layers time, trauma, and perception with real control. There are callbacks. There are planted details that only reveal their full meaning later. There are quiet suggestions scattered throughout that Judith may not be the first woman this has happened to, suggestions the screenplay does not underline or explain. It trusts the audience to find them.
That is the mark of a writer with genuine confidence in their own construction. It is disheartening that Blackout arrives at this ceremony with only one nomination. If there is one category where we believe justice should be served tomorrow night, this is it.
Our Prediction: Ikenna Okpara — Blackout
AMVCA BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Nominated: Jermaine Edwards / Kabelo Thathe / Emmanuel Igbekele (The Herd) / Daanong Gyang / Emmanuel Igbekele (Gingerrr) / Emmanuel Igbekele (The Serpent’s Gift) / KC Obiajulu
We want to acknowledge Emmanuel Igbekele’s story first, because it is genuinely worth acknowledging. He shot three of the most prominent films in this AMVCA cycle, The Herd, The Serpent’s Gift, and Gingerrr, and received a Best Cinematography nomination for each of them. His work on The Herd in particular, the shift from warm golden wedding visuals to the cold, claustrophobic reality of captivity, is purposeful and effective. He is an undeniable talent, and as critics have noted, this recognition is long overdue for work that has been quietly building across Nollywood for years. Shooting all three of those films in the same cycle is a remarkable professional feat, and the three-way nomination tells a compelling story.
For To Kill A Monkey, Kabelo Thathe brought real visual intelligence to the series. The deliberate use of low angles early on to establish Oboz’s dominance, gradually reversed as Efe’s choices begin to shift the power between them, is cinematography in direct service of storytelling. That kind of thinking deserves recognition.
Across our reviews of The Herd, The Serpent’s Gift, and Gingerrr, we described the cinematography in each as clean and serviceable. That is a genuine compliment, not a dismissal. Clear and competent visual execution matters in filmmaking. But “serviceable” means the photography does its job without drawing attention to itself. It does not mean the photography is actively carrying part of the story.
My Father’s Shadow does something different entirely. Jermaine Edwards, in his feature debut, did not simply shoot a film. He and Davies built a visual language from the ground up, over a year of pre-production. The decision to shoot on 16mm Kodak stock was not about aesthetics for its own sake. It was a decision about memory, about the particular quality of time that only that format can hold. The grain, the warmth, the texture of the image all communicate that we are inside recollection, inside a past that has not been cleaned up into digital clarity.
The camera observes from below, from the sightline of a child. Adults take up more of the frame than they should, and that imbalance tells you something true about how children experience the power of the adults around them. When the political world begins to intrude, the shift to handheld urgency is not a stylistic choice. It is the visual grammar of an adult reality breaking into childhood. The Third Mainland Bridge crossing is a single shot that has stayed with us since we saw the film. The cinematography is central to why this film won what it won at Cannes. It is undisputed for us.
Our prediction: Jermaine Edwards — My Father’s Shadow
AMVCA BEST SCORE/MUSIC
Nominated: Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra (My Father’s Shadow) / Nissi Ogulu (3 Cold Dishes) / Tolu Obanro (Gingerrr) / Oscar Herman-Ackah (To Kill A Monkey) / Chubb Okobah (Osamede)
A film score is doing its best work when you barely notice it is there. It is doing its most important work when you find yourself returning to it after the film is over, not to recreate the watching experience but because the music has become its own emotional object separate from the images it was built around.
That is what Oscar Herman-Ackah’s score for To Kill A Monkey did for us. It is inseparable from the emotional experience of watching Efe and Oboz move toward their slow, mutual destruction. Some of us found ourselves going back to key musical cues after the series ended, not because they are formally complex, but because they are emotionally true. The relationship between the score and the series’ themes of loss, loyalty, and moral compromise is so closely calibrated that the music carries a portion of the narrative weight on its own. That is a real achievement.
The closest competition, in our estimation, is the score for My Father’s Shadow. Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra’s work is remarkable, deeply woven into the film’s emotional and historical logic, breathing with the same restrained grief that runs through the whole production. The difference for us is that the My Father’s Shadow score is most powerful when it is inseparable from its images, which is excellent in its own right. The To Kill A Monkey score is something you carry out of the room. That lingering quality is what tips our prediction.
On Osamede: we reviewed the film, and its score did not emerge as a focal point for us. It may have registered more strongly with other audiences than our review captured, but we gathered no strong critical consensus to change our position. 3 Cold Dishes and Gingerrr we both reviewed, and neither produced a score that lodged in our critical memory.
Our prediction: Oscar Herman-Ackah — To Kill A Monkey
These are the predictions of the Nolly Critic editorial team. They reflect our honest analysis, our time spent watching, our reviews, and our convictions about what great African cinema looks like. We may be wrong on a few of these. That is the nature of predictions. But we stand behind every word.
Now it is your turn. What are your own predictions, and why? Let us know in the comments.
The 12th AMVCA holds on May 9, 2026. Watch this space.
