Before the 2024 Golden Globes, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, who is well-known in the entertainment sector for his sharp critiques of Nollywood movies and Nigerian pop music, has been named an international voter.
International voters must live outside of the US, according to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization in charge of administering the awards. Along with that, they must have “verified entertainment journalistic clippings for international media outlets, including print, broadcast, radio, photography, and online.”
Aigbokhaevbolo has reviewed films playing at and written reports on several festivals, including the Durban Film Festival in South Africa, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Berlin Film Festival in Germany, Cannes, Sundance in the US, and Africa’s oldest film festival, FESPACO, in Burkina Faso, in addition to his frequently robust writing about Nollywood movies.
He accepted an invitation from the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam to participate in a panel discussion on media diversity in the Netherlands in 2021. He received an invitation to the Saudi Arabian Red Sea Film Festival in 2022. At the Dubai media exhibition CABSAT in the United Arab Emirates that same year, he discussed Nollywood and Nigeria’s emerging tech ecosystem.
Aigbokhaevbolo’s first significant recognition as a writer and film critic came in 2014 when he was the only applicant to be selected by all three juries at programs for young critics in Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa, even though his writing career began while he was a Pharmacy school undergraduate at the University of Benin. He participated in the South African and European programs in 2015 and 2014, respectively, but this was the first time a single candidate was invited to all three programs in the same calendar year.
Aigbokhaevbolo has written for and reported for publications including the New York Review, Chimurenga, the Washington Post, the Africa Report, the London Review of Books, the Guardian UK, and Sight and Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute. He writes frequently about movies for an international readership at the US-based digital newspaper The Film Verdict from his home in Lagos.
Regarding his invitation to the Golden Globes as an international voter, he claimed that it was a sign of the increasing appreciation for the contribution of Africa to the film industry.
