Awards season is starting. Over the coming months, studios will launch campaigns, critics’ groups will hand out their prizes and the Academy Awards will close it all out early next year. Behind the red carpet is a voting system that most viewers have never had explained to them, and it shapes which films win more than any campaign does.
Who votes
The Oscars are decided by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded in 1927. Today it has roughly 10,000 voting members around the world. Membership is by invitation, and members are organized into branches for their profession: actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, producers, composers and others. The acting branch is the largest.
The Academy has expanded and diversified its membership significantly over the past decade, adding more women, more members of color and many more international film professionals. That has changed the kinds of films that get nominated.
Round one: nominations
In most categories, members nominate only within their own field. Directors nominate directors, editors nominate editors and actors nominate performances. This peer-review structure is what makes an Oscar nomination meaningful to people in the industry.
Best Picture is the main exception: every voting member can nominate in that category. International feature, animated feature and documentary categories use committees or opt-in groups of members who commit to watching the eligible films.
Round two: the winners
Once nominations are announced, all voting members can vote for the winners in most categories, not just their own branch. Most categories are decided by a simple plurality: the nominee with the most votes wins, even without a majority.
The Academy has also tightened rules on whether members watch the films. Starting with the 2026 ceremony, members must confirm they have seen all the nominated films in a category before they can vote in it, a response to long-running stories about voters skipping films they had not watched.
Why Best Picture is different
Best Picture has had ten nominees since the 2022 ceremony, and it uses a preferential, or ranked-choice, ballot. Instead of choosing one film, members rank the nominees from favorite to least favorite. Counting then works like this:
- All ballots are sorted by their first choice.
- If a film has more than half of the first-choice votes, it wins.
- If not, the film with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and each of its ballots moves to that voter’s next choice still in the race.
- The process repeats until one film has a majority.
The effect is significant. A film that many voters love but many others dislike can lead the first count and still lose, because it picks up few second- and third-place votes as others are eliminated. A film that almost everyone ranks highly, even if few rank it first, can overtake it. That is why Best Picture often goes to the broadly admired choice rather than the most daring one.
What campaigns try to do
Studios spend heavily on screenings, advertising and events during “Oscar season.” With a ranked ballot, the smartest campaigns aim not only to win first-place votes but to stay off voters’ lists of films they dislike. Being many voters’ second choice can be worth more than being a passionate minority’s first.
How to predict the winners
The Oscars draw on the same voters who belong to other industry groups, so earlier awards are useful signals. The guilds, such as the Producers Guild, which also uses a ranked ballot for its top prize, the Directors Guild and the Actor Awards (formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards), are often the best predictors. Critics’ prizes are less reliable, because critics are not the people voting.
What we think
The Academy’s voting rules are not neutral. The ranked ballot for Best Picture deliberately rewards consensus, and the peer nomination system rewards films that impress people who make movies, not necessarily audiences. Both are defensible choices.
Understanding them makes awards season more interesting. When a bold, divisive film wins the critics’ prizes but loses Best Picture, it is usually not a snub or a scandal. It is the ballot doing exactly what it was designed to do.
