For the first time in its 51-year history, the Student Academy Awards ceremony is taking place outside Los Angeles and will occur at London’s Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on Monday evening (October 14).
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ initiative has built the platform for emerging talent to showcase their work within the industry, and prior winners include directors Spike Lee, Pete Docter, Patricia Cardoso, Patricia Riggen and Robert Zemeckis.
In partnership with the BFI London Film Festival, Student Academy Award winners will get access to panels and networking opportunities, and exclusive access to Academy members to support career advancement.
The move is part of the Academy’s drive to grow its global presence and recruit more international members. Current CEO Bill Kramer is a big part of that as the non-profit has stepped up its international itinerary, recently attending the Cannes, Venice and Toronto film festivals with more trips planned in the future.
The international component of the Academy’s membership has been growing too. Of this year’s intake of 487 new members, 56% came from 56 countries and territories outside the United States – up from a 52% share in 2023. At time of writing, some 20% of the organisation’s 10,883 members hail from countries and territories outside the United States.
Kramer spoke to Screen on the eve of the 51st Student Academy Awards ceremony about the role of the student awards, international festival outreach, revenue streams and the Academy100 fundraising drive.
A list of the 15 winners appears at the bottom of the interview.
Why are the Student Academy Awards taking place in London this year?
The future of the Academy is global. We’re becoming, along with the film industry and the film-going public, a more global organisation. As part of that, we’re out in the world much more, attending film festivals like Cameraimage, Marrakech, Morelia, Cannes, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival.
We’re doing this so we can engage with our international members and that’s why we’re bringing the student Academy Awards to London. Many of our recipients are international so having an event like this in London makes sense for the work that we’re doing, and the winners can be in London to celebrate with our international members.
When did you start planning the London event?
We started talking about moving the Student Academy Awards outside of Los Angeles about two years ago, around the time I became CEO. [BFI CEO] Ben Roberts and BFI are incredibly close partners of ours, and because we’re in London for the film festival we thought this would be a great way to tie in the Student Academy Awards to an existing partnership. We have our new member reception in London at the same time, so there’s a great opportunity for us to bring these students closer to many Academy members.
Can we expect the Student Academy Awards to go outside the United States next year?
You will see many more of our Academy programmes in global settings moving forward.
How does the Academy benefit from attending major international festivals?
It creates many opportunities and we get to engage with our international members at a higher level. We meet emerging international film artists at these festivals, we educate them about the Academy and explain the awards process, and get them excited about being future Academy members. We also discover a lot of interesting films that we may not see at US festivals.
We hear Buenos Aires is part of the upcoming itinerary.
That’s all part of the next several years, leading up to our 100th anniversary [in 2028], but yes, we will be in many cities, including Buenos Aires.
Which regions have shown the most representation in terms of new members in recent years? Where would you like to grow membership more?
We have a very strong European contingent that’s growing. Areas of focus [are] Africa, Asia, South America and Latin America. The film industry is growing in these areas, and you’re seeing it in some of our Oscar nominations – international films being nominated in categories beyond the international feature film category.
Can you elaborate on your remarks at the recent Financial Times Business of Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles, when you said the Academy needs to redefine the metric of success?
We are a non-profit arts and culture organisation and like any healthy organisation, diversification of audiences, membership and revenue sources are key to being sustainable. For many years, we defined our success by how many people watched the Oscars on linear television.
Now, I should say we have an amazing partnership with ABC and Disney and we are so grateful for them – and we’re excited to expand that partnership. But as we think about how we define success, I’m looking at many things. How many visitors are engaging with us on our social channels? We have millions of followers on our social channels, much more than even two years ago. How many people are coming to our museum, attending our screenings, engaging in our educational programmes? How many people are watching the Oscars around the world? What’s our international viewership? How many people are pledging their support to our work?
We’re a non-profit organisation, and we have thousands of donors, beyond just our Academy members, who are supporting our work to preserve global film history, to educate emerging film artists, to curate film programmes around the world. I look at all of those indicators and think that really allows us to have diversified support, diversified programming and a sustainable path forward. And with all of those factors there’s a global component, so there’s an expansion of our stakeholder groups and our audiences through looking at these metrics. That’s exciting for us – [there are] so many untapped opportunities.
Many young people who do not watch the entire Oscars ceremony live watch clips on social media that night and over the following days. How can you monetise that?
That is a lot of the work that we’re doing right now, with corporate sponsorships, with individual donors, with partners with YouTube and TikTok. The work has already started. We’re looking into licensing our clips and archival materials. We have the largest film-related collection in the world, over 52 million items. These are all areas that are potential monetisation plays for us.
A lot of this work is part of what we’re calling Academy100, our $500m US fundraising campaign and revenue diversification campaign that we launched in Rome with Cinecittà in May. This will take us to the end of 2028, the year of our 100th Oscars. All of these components go into that campaign.
Who are you licensing the clips to?
We’re working with many partners. People come to us for projects where they need to access our archival clips, and we are looking at other partnerships that can extend the reach of our incredible collection and archive.
What will this $500m war chest be used for?
The $500m is partially for [year-round] operating support, and partially an expansion of our endowments and general portfolio, which is a great insurance policy for our future. It’s also creating endowments that help sustain our work with our library, our archive, our museum, our educational programmes, and it also helps with our physical spaces in our museum and our other campus buildings. So there are many uses for that funding.
And besides those costs, the idea is to have a healthy amount of money in the coffers to use after the centenary, yes?
Correct. Any healthy non-profit organisation needs a strong endowment and general portfolio that can get you through times when resources may not be there and allows for sustainability and evolution.
2024 Student Academy Award winners
The 15 Student Academy Award winners were chosen from 2,683 submissions from 738 colleges and universities worldwide. On Monday each will learn whether they earned gold, silver or bronze placements in four categories.
Winners by category appear below in alphabetical order. All Student Academy Award winners are eligible to compete for the Oscars in the animated short film, live-action short film or documentary short film categories:
Alternative/Experimental:
Akshit Kumar, bonVoyage pour monVoyage, National Institute of Design, India
Dori Walker, In Living Memory, Brown University, US
Birdy Wei-Ting Hung, A Brighter Summer Day For The Lady Avengers, San Francisco State University, US
Animation:
Spencer Baird, Student Accomplice, Brigham Young University, US
Kei Kanamori, Origami, Digital Hollywood University, Japan
Florian Maurice, Maxime Foltzer & Estelle Bonnardel, Au Revoir Mon Monde, MoPA 3D Animation School, France
Documentary:
Aaron Johnson, The 17%, Chapman University, US
Hannah Rafkin, Keeper, School of Visual Arts, US
Rishabh Raj Jain, A Dream Called Khushi (Happiness), New York University, US
Narrative:
Jens Kevin Georg, Crust, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Germany
Pavel Sýkora & Viktor Horák, The Compatriot, Filmová Akademie Miroslava Ondříčka v Písku, Czech Republic
Robin Wang, Neither Donkey Nor Horse, University of Southern California, US
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