During the 98th Oscars on March 15, the Academy announced a rare two-way split with both “Two People Exchanging Saliva” and “The Singers” taking home the prize for the best live action short film.
Only the seventh tie in Oscar history, the result was a surprise to the audience in the room, presenter Kumail Nanjiani and many watching at home — except for a group of film festival programmers over 600 miles away in Provo, Utah.
Founded in 2014 by Jonathan Martin, the annual genre festival FilmQuest covers fantasy, sci-fi and horror and received over 2,300 submissions in 2025, according to Martin. Among those were “The Singers,” which took home the festival’s grand prize for best short film, and “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” which won best foreign short.
“The moment [Nanjiani] said ‘We have a tie,’ I turned to my wife and said, ‘The Singers’ and ‘Two People’ won,” says Martin, who recalls frantically texting his team and the films’ directors to offer his congratulations. “It was a win for genre films, and a win for all our filmmakers.”
This wasn’t the first time FilmQuest had crowned the same short film winner as the Academy – just one year prior, “The Robot” took home both the Oscar and the “Golden Cthulhu,” as the FilmQuest team refers to their grand prize.
According to Martin, FilmQuest has “a dynamic, robust scoring system” that it prides itself on — one that makes picking winners a fair and accurate process. A jury of 15 to 20 judges ranks their choices from best to worst in secret, which “more often than not, produces a very clear winner.”
“We look at every discipline of a film, from its concept and originality to the acting, to the quality of the effects,” explains Martin, adding that each component is ranked on a scale of one to 10, with the deciding filmmakers gathering to discuss their thoughts after reviewing. “We start with the worst and go to the best, and we really talk through it and have an aggregate of all the scores.” For “Two People Exchanging Saliva” and “The Singers,” the ultimate decision was “neck and neck” — while FilmQuest doesn’t announce ties, it’s a good thing the Academy can, jokes Martin.
The inaugural FilmQuest was held at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, attached to a week-long fantasy convention. While Martin and his team enjoyed hosting the festival in Utah’s capital, they felt restricted by the size of the megaplex and its location. After three years, Martin decided to move the festival to Provo, just a 40-minute drive from Salt Lake City.
“I remember a headline in the local paper said, ‘FilmQuest moves to Provo not to get smaller, but to get bigger,’ and we did that,” says Martin. “We have limited resources, but we bring almost a million dollars of economic impact to the city each year. We’re growing, and now that Sundance has left, we are the largest film festival in Utah.”
As FilmQuest heads into its 13th edition this fall, Martin and his team have one goal on their mind: To become an Academy Award-qualifying festival.
“At this moment, only one genre festival in the world qualifies for the Oscars, and we have been open about wanting to become the second,” says Martin, adding that he hopes for filmmakers to get noticed through FilmQuest. “I believe genre is much broader than people think – far more dynamic and far more expansive.”
Leave a Reply