How the Oscars Actually Work: Categories, Voting, and History

Who Actually Votes

The Academy Awards are handed out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), founded in 1927 by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer along with a group of Hollywood producers, actors, and craftspeople. Membership is invitation-only and organized into branches — actors, directors, cinematographers, editors, and so on — with each branch nominating the winners in its own category. For most of the 20th century membership numbers and demographics were not publicly disclosed, but the Academy has published membership figures more openly since 2016, when it launched a public initiative to expand and diversify its voting body; membership now numbers in the thousands worldwide across more than a dozen branches.

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, lasted about 15 minutes, and the winners had already been announced three months earlier — a far cry from today’s multi-hour live broadcast with winners revealed on stage. The ceremony has been televised live since 1953, and the statuette itself has been nicknamed "Oscar" since at least the early 1930s, though the exact origin of the nickname is disputed.

How Best Picture Voting Actually Works

Best Picture is the only category every voting member of the Academy can vote on at both the nomination and final stages; every other category is nominated by its relevant branch (only directors nominate directors, only editors nominate editors) but voted on by the full membership in the final round. Since 2009, when the category expanded from five nominees to as many as ten, Best Picture has used a preferential (instant-runoff) ballot instead of simple plurality voting: voters rank every nominee in order of preference, and if no film has a majority of first-place votes, the lowest-ranked film is eliminated and its ballots redistributed to those voters’ next choice, repeating until one film has a majority. This system was adopted specifically to prevent a film from winning with a small plurality while most voters actually preferred something else.

• Nomination round — branch members nominate within their own specialty (actors nominate acting performances, directors nominate directors), except Best Picture which every member can nominate.
• Final round — the full voting membership votes across every category using preferential ballots for Best Picture and simple ballots elsewhere.
• Vote counting is handled by an independent accounting firm; results are kept secret from Academy staff and presenters until the envelope is opened on stage.

How the Category List Has Evolved

The Oscars have added, renamed, and retired categories repeatedly over nearly a century. The Foreign Language Film category, introduced as a competitive award in 1956, was officially renamed Best International Feature Film in 2019 after the Academy said the older name felt outdated. Categories such as Best Original Song, Best Animated Feature (added in 2001), and Best Documentary Feature were all added well after the ceremony’s founding as those art forms matured and grew commercially significant enough to warrant recognition.