Film Guides / Awards and festivals
The Oscars explained
Who votes for the Academy Awards, how a film qualifies, how Best Picture is counted and why the ceremony moves the box office.
What the Oscars are
The Academy Awards, known everywhere as the Oscars, are presented each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional organization founded in Hollywood in 1927. The awards honor achievement in films released during the previous calendar year.
The first ceremony took place on 16 May 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It lasted about 15 minutes, and the winners had been announced in advance. Wings, a silent drama, received the top award. Today the ceremony is a live global broadcast held in late winter or early spring, usually at the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
The gold statuette depicts a knight standing on a reel of film. Nobody knows for certain who first called it "Oscar," and several competing stories exist, so treat any single origin tale with caution.
Who votes
The Academy has more than 10,000 voting members, all invited film professionals. Members belong to branches that mirror the roles on a film crew: actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, sound, visual effects, music, production design, producers and more.
| Stage | Who votes | How |
|---|---|---|
| Nominations | Members of each branch vote in their own category (actors nominate actors, editors nominate editors) | Ranked ballots |
| Best Picture nominations | All voting members | Ranked ballots |
| International Feature, Animated Feature and some others | Committees and members who opt in, with viewing requirements | Varies by category |
| Final winners | All voting members can vote in nearly every category | Most votes wins, except Best Picture |
Voting is done online, and an independent accounting firm tabulates the results and keeps the winners secret until the envelopes are opened on stage.
How Best Picture is counted
Best Picture uses a preferential ballot. Voters rank all nominees from favorite to least favorite.
- All first-choice votes are counted.
- If no film has more than half, the film with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated.
- Those ballots move to each voter's next surviving choice.
- The process repeats until one film has a majority.
This system rewards films that many members like a lot, not just films a passionate minority loves. Since the 2022 ceremony, Best Picture has had a fixed ten nominees.
How a film qualifies
To be eligible, a feature generally must have a qualifying theatrical release in the United States during the calendar year, including a run of consecutive days in a commercial cinema in one of several qualifying US cities. Running time must exceed 40 minutes. Rules change from year to year, so the Academy publishes updated rules every season.
The International Feature Film category works differently. Each country submits one film through an official selection body, and the film can be in any language other than English. The category was called Best Foreign Language Film until it was renamed in 2019.
Records and milestones
- Most wins for one film: 11, shared by Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
- Most wins by an individual: Walt Disney, with 22 competitive Oscars.
- First non-English-language Best Picture: Parasite from South Korea, at the 2020 ceremony. Read about it in our guide to the Korean wave.
- The "Big Five": only three films have won Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay: It Happened One Night (1934), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Awards season and the box office
The Oscars sit at the end of a long "awards season" that starts with fall festivals such as Venice, Telluride and Toronto, continues through guild and critics awards, and ends in early spring. Studios often release their most ambitious films late in the year so they are fresh in voters' minds.
A nomination or win can give a film a second life in cinemas, with re-releases and expanded screen counts, though the effect is strongest for smaller films. See how the box office works for why.
Many cinemas run Best Picture marathons before the ceremony, screening all nominees over one or two days. It is the easiest way to see the whole field.
For the European counterpart with a very different voting system, read our guide to the Cannes Film Festival.
