Winners of the 2015 Student Academy Awards® Announced
LOS ANGELES, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tonight honored 15 student winners from colleges and universities around the world at the 42nd Student Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. The Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal awards were announced and presented by actors Michelle Rodriguez and Jason Mitchell, Oscar®-winning director John Lasseter, and the Oscar-winning team behind the animated feature “Big Hero 6,” Roy Conli, Don Hall and Chris Williams.
The 2015 Student Academy Award® winners are:
Alternative
Gold: “Chiaroscuro,” Daniel Drummond, Chapman University, California
Silver: “Zoe,” ChiHyun Lee, The School of Visual Arts, New York
Animation
Gold: “Soar,” Alyce Tzue, Academy of Art University, San Francisco
Silver: “An Object at Rest,” Seth Boyden, California Institute of the Arts
Bronze: “Taking the Plunge,” Nicholas Manfredi and Elizabeth Ku-Herrero, The School of
Visual Arts
Documentary
Gold: “Looking at the Stars,” Alexandre Peralta, University of Southern California
Silver: “I Married My Family’s Killer,” Emily Kassie, Brown University
Bronze: “Boxeadora,” Meg Smaker, Stanford University
Narrative
Gold: “Day One,” Henry Hughes, American Film Institute, California
Silver: “This Way Up,” Jeremy Cloe, American Film Institute
Bronze: “Stealth,” Bennett Lasseter, American Film Institute
Foreign Film
Gold: “Fidelity,” Ilker Çatak, Hamburg Media School, Germany
Silver: “The Last Will,” Dustin Loose, Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany
Bronze: “Everything Will Be Okay” Patrick Vollrath, Filmakademie Wien, Austria
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. Past Student Academy Award winners have gone on to receive 47 Oscar nominations and have won or shared eight awards. They include Pete Docter, John Lasseter, Spike Lee, Trey Parker and Robert Zemeckis.
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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.
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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