At the 98th Oscars ceremony on March 15, the Academy announced an unusual split decision, with both “Saliva Swapping” and “The Singers” winning Best Live-Action Short Film.
The result, the seventh tie in Oscar history, came as a surprise to many watching at home, except for the audience, presenter Kumail Nanjiani, and a group of festival programmers in Provo, Utah, more than 900 miles away.
FilmQuest, an annual genre festival founded by Jonathan Martin in 2014 that covers fantasy, science fiction and horror, received more than 2,300 submissions in 2025, Martin said. Among them were “The Singers,” which won the festival’s Best Short Film award, and “Saliva,” which won the Best Foreign Short Film award.
“The moment[Nanjiani]said, ‘It’s a draw,’ I turned to my wife and said, ‘The Singers’ and ‘The Two of Us’ won,” Martin recalled frantically sending congratulatory emails to his team and filmmakers. “This was a victory for genre films and a victory for all filmmakers.”
This was not the first time FilmQuest had won the Academy Award for Best Short Film. Just a year earlier, “The Robot” won both the Oscar and “Golden Cthulhu,” as the FilmQuest team calls the Grand Prix.
According to Martin, FilmQuest boasts a “dynamic and robust scoring system” that allows them to select winners in a fair and accurate process. A jury of 15 to 20 judges secretly ranks the choices from best to worst, “often creating a clear winner.”
“We consider every area of the film, from concept and originality to the quality of the acting and effects,” Martin explains, adding that each element is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, and the filmmakers who make the decision meet together after the review to discuss their thoughts. “We start at the worst and go to the best, and we discuss it thoroughly and tally up all the scores.” For “Saliva Swap” and “The Singers,” the final decision was “consistent” — FilmQuest doesn’t announce ties, but Martin jokes that it’s good the Academy can announce them.
The first FilmQuest was held at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City in conjunction with the week-long Fantasy Convention. Martin and his team enjoyed hosting the festival in Utah’s capital city, but felt they were limited 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 seeing a headline in the local paper that said, ‘FilmQuest is moving to Provo to get bigger, not smaller.’ And that’s what we did,” Martin says. “We have limited resources, but we bring almost $1 million in economic impact to the city each year. We’re growing, and now that Sundance is gone, we’re the largest film festival in Utah.”
As FilmQuest enters its 13th year this fall, Martin and his team have one goal in mind. It’s about being a festival worthy of the Academy Awards.
“Right now, there’s only one genre festival in the world that’s eligible for the Oscars, but we’re open to wanting to be the second,” Martin said, adding that he hopes filmmakers will get noticed through FilmQuest. “I believe the genre is much broader than people realize. It’s much more dynamic, much more expansive.”
