Nollywood Buzz: Inside the AMVCA's Most Talked-About Lead Actress Race

 

Nollywood Buzz: Inside the AMVCA's Most Talked-About Lead Actress Race

There is a particular kind of year Nollywood has every so often, one where the box office numbers stop feeling like industry gossip and start feeling like history. 2025 was that kind of year, and this spring's Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards made sure everyone noticed.

At the center of the conversation sits Scarlet Gomez, whose performance in "Behind The Scenes" carried the film past two billion naira at the box office making it Nollywood's highest-grossing production of the year. Gomez plays Aderonke Faniran, a wealthy real estate figure whose generosity toward the people around her slowly becomes its own kind of exhaustion. It is a role built on quiet depletion rather than spectacle, and it earned her a Best Lead Actress nomination that, for a performer once known mainly for television, marked a real turning point.

She wasn't nominated in an empty room. The category this year read like a survey of Nollywood's different eras standing side by side. Sola Sobowale brought her instantly recognizable command to "Her Excellency." Bimbo Akintola, a fixture of the industry for three decades, played a cybercrime investigator in Kemi Adetiba's Netflix hit "To Kill A Monkey" with the kind of restraint that makes a scene feel heavier without raising its volume. Genoveva Umeh, Ariyike Owolagba, Ifeoma Fafunwa and Gloria Anozie-Young rounded out a field that judges — led by veteran actress Joke Silva — clearly had a difficult time narrowing down.

In the end, it was Linda Ejiofor who walked away with the trophy for "The Serpent's Gift," and did something the ceremony had never seen before: she also took Best Supporting Actress that same night, for her work in "The Herd," making her the first performer to win both categories at a single AMVCA. It was the kind of moment that tends to overshadow everything around it, but it doesn't erase what Gomez's nomination represented. A commercial hit of that size, carried by a performance built on emotional weight rather than noise, is still a marker worth sitting with.

The men's category told its own story of range. Uzor Arukwe took Best Lead Actor for "Colours of Fire," beating out a field that included Kanayo O. Kanayo, Lateef Adedimeji, Mike Ezuruonye and William Benson — a lineup spanning genre work, drama and pure star power, which is more or less the definition of a healthy year for an industry.

Zoom out, and the wider nomination list tells you where Nollywood's energy actually was in 2025. "Gingerrr" and "The Herd" each pulled nine nominations, with "To Kill A Monkey" and Akinola Davies Jr.'s "My Father's Shadow" close behind. Films built for streaming, films built for the big screen, and films built for word of mouth were all competing in the same rooms this year, which says something about how porous those categories have become.

None of this resolves neatly into a single headline. What it shows, instead, is an industry with more than one way to succeed right now — box office records, streaming dominance, festival recognition — all landing on the same stage in Lagos. Gomez's nomination for "Behind The Scenes" is one thread in that story, not the whole of it, but it's the thread most people will keep talking about.