2023 Student Academy Award Winners Revealed

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tonight honored its student winners from colleges and universities around the world at the 50th Student Academy Awards ceremony.  

The Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal awards were announced and presented during an in-person ceremony held at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.  This year, the Student Academy Awards competition received a total of 2,443 entries from 720 colleges and universities around the world.  With welcome remarks by Patricia Cardoso, the night’s category presenters included The Super Mario Bros. Movie directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, SAA committee chair Peggy Rajski and past winners Brad Bailey, Sujin Kim, Ken Kwapis, Freddy Macdonald, Olivia Peace and Kevin Wilson Jr.

The 2023 ceremony is available to view here.

The 2023 Student Academy Award medalists are:

Alternative/Experimental
Gold: “Skin,” Leo Behrens, American Film Institute

Animation
Gold: “Boom,” Gabriel Augerai, Romain Augier & Yannick Jacquin, École des Nouvelles Images, France
Silver: “Diplomatie de l’Éclipse,” César Luton, Achille Pasquier & Clémence Bailly, MoPA 3D Animation School, France
Bronze: “Mum’s Spaghetti,” Lisa Kenney, National Film and Television School, United Kingdom

Documentary
Gold: “Wings of Dust,” Giorgio Ghiotto, New York University
Silver: “Duet,” Lyuwei Chen, New York University
Bronze: “Hasta Encontrarlos (Till We Find Them),” Jean Chapiro, Columbia University

Narrative 
Gold: “Invisible Border,” Mark Gerstorfer, Filmakademie Wien, Austria
Silver: “Revisited,” Iain Aigin Stronach Forbes, Den Norske Filmskolen, Norway
Bronze: “Istina (Truth),” Tamara Denić, Hamburg Media School, Germany

First-time honors go to École des Nouvelles Images (France).

All Student Academy Award-winning films are eligible to compete for 2023 Oscars in the Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film or Documentary Short Film category.  The 2023 winners join the ranks of such past Student Academy Award winners as Patricia Cardoso, Pete Docter, Spike Lee, Patricia Riggen and Robert Zemeckis.  Past winners have gone on to receive 67 Oscar nominations and have won or shared 15 awards. 

The Student Academy Awards were established in 1972 to provide a platform for emerging global talent by creating opportunities within the industry to showcase their work.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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