If there's one thing we can guarantee once the Oscars is over for another year this weekend, it'll be that one of your favourite movies missed out on the night and you'll think it's an outrage. This year's is one of the most open in years, with One Battle After Another and Sinners battling it out in multiple categories.
Before you go lamenting your favourite's loss or celebrating their win, it's good to know how the voting works, and who's actually doing the voting. But who do we blame when such things happen?
Basically, you want to know who are the Academy? Who makes up this seemingly all-powerful body whose approval represents the highest possible accolade one can receive in Hollywood? Read on to find out all you need to know.
Who votes for the Oscars, and who are the Academy's members?
The answer, historically, has been almost exclusively white men. According to a 2014 survey conducted by The Los Angeles Times, Oscar voters were on average 63 years old, 76% of them were men, and 94% of them were white.
Fortunately, that's changed a bit in the last few years — although white men do still make up the largest proportion of voters.
After 2016's outcry around the significant lack of diversity, the Academy announced plans to address this, promising to double its number of women and ethnically diverse members by 2020.
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It has steadily been doing this since then with each batch of newly-invited members. Last year, the Academy invited 534 new members including Mikey Madison, Kieran Culkin, Coralie Fargeat, Naomi Ackie and Jane Schoenbrun.
Of the invited members, 41% were women, 45% belonged to under-represented communities and 55% were from countries outside of the US (via IndieWire).
It means there are now 11,120 members of the Academy, with 10,136 eligible to vote on the Oscars. Including the 2025 invitees, 35% of members identify as women, 22% from under-represented ethnic and racial communities, and 21% are from outside of the US.
How many votes does it take to get an Oscar nomination?
An easy question with a very complicated answer. There are different voting branches for each category at the Academy Awards, where members vote in their own fields.
For example, the Actors branch votes to nominate in all four acting awards, the directors vote for Best Director nominees and so on. How many votes you need to secure a nomination depends on the size of the voting branch, as well as how many within that voting branch vote.
According to The Wrap, a movie would need 922 votes to guarantee a Best Picture nomination since that's a category that everybody votes in.
In the other categories which are voted for by members of their respective branches, the number can vary from just over 200 votes to guarantee an acting nomination down to only 30 votes to guarantee a nomination in the new Casting category.
This collegiate voting partially explains the discrepancies that often happen between categories – for example when a Best Film nominee doesn't get a Best Director nod, or vice versa.
How are the Oscars winners decided?
Once all 17 branches have voted on nominations, the catchily-named auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (or PwC for short) uses a very complex weighting system to measure the results and determine the five nominees for each category outside of Best Picture, where up to 10 movies can be nominated.
Once the nominations are in, things get simpler. All members are allowed to vote for the winner across all categories, and the nominee with the most votes wins.
However, there are a few categories – such as Best International Feature Film – where members have to have seen all of the nominees in order to vote.
Best Picture is a bit more complicated, as all members put their choices in order of preference. If a movie earns more than 50% of the vote when PwC tallies the number-one choices of all members, then it wins. Simple.
That's unlikely to happen, though, and the movie with the lowest number of top spot votes is eliminated. PwC then redistributes those number-one votes to the number-two choice of the member who voted for it.
PwC goes on to tallying number-two choices, then number-three choices and so on, until one movie gains more than 50% of the vote.
This tends to favour less-controversial movies. A movie might win having been everyone's second or third favourite, whereas more divisive movies might be one voter's top first and another voter's bottom choice.
What impact do other awards ceremonies have on the Oscars?
The Producers Guild of America (PGA) is the awards body whose membership overlaps most with the Academy's, which is why their results are seen as most relevant to Oscar predictions.
The PGA Awards has correctly forecast the eventual Best Picture winner 26 out of the 36 years that the awards have been running, including the past five winners: Anora, Oppenheimer, Everything Everywhere All At Once, CODA and Nomadland. That could be a good sign for this year's PGA winner One Battle After Another.
When it comes to the acting categories, the best indicator of Oscar success is at the Actor Awards, formerly known as Screen Actors Guild Awards, while the person who wins top prize at the Directors Guild of America Awards is all-but guaranteed to win the Oscar.
The 98th Academy Awards take place on Sunday 15 March. It will be broadcast live on ITV1 in the UK.
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Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
