How the Oscars Work

Picking the Oscar Winners

To be eligible for nominations in any of the feature film categories, a movie must meet these basic requirements [source: 90TH Annual Academy Awards of Merit Rules]:

It must be more than 40 minutes long.
Its public premiere must have been in a movie theater, during the appropriate calendar year.
It must have premiered in 35mm or 70mm film format or in 24-frame, progressive scan digital format.
It must have played in an L.A. County theater, for paid admission, for seven consecutive days, beginning in the appropriate calendar year.

If a producer or distributor would like their eligible film to be considered for an Oscar nomination, they must submit an Official Screen Credits form. This form lists the production credits for all related Oscar categories. The Academy collects these forms and lists the submitted films in the "Reminder List of Eligible Releases." In January, the Academy mails a nomination ballot and a copy of the "Reminder List" to each Academy member.

For most of the award categories, only Academy members in that particular field are allowed to vote for nominees (that is, only directors submit nominations for best director and only editors submit nominations for best editor). Foreign film and documentary nominees are chosen by special screening groups made up of Academy members from all branches, and everybody gets to select best picture nominees. There must be at least five but no more than 10 nominees for Best Picture. Foreign film nominees are selected from a list of films submitted by foreign nations. Every foreign country can only submit one film per year [source: 90TH Annual Academy Awards of Merit Rules].

An Academy member can select five nominees per category, ranked in order of preference. For most categories, voters write in only the film title. For acting categories, the voters pick specific actors. It's up to the individual Academy voters to decide whether an actor should be nominated for leading role or supporting role. An actor can't be nominated for both categories for a single performance, however. The Academy assigns the nominee to whichever category the nominee qualifies for first. Producers often take out ads in Variety and other major movie industry magazines to suggest nominees for particular categories [source: Academy Award Regulations].

Academy members typically have a couple of weeks to submit their choices for nominees [source: Oscars]. Once the ballots are in, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) tabulates the nominee ballot votes in secrecy. Then, the Academy announces the nominees [source: Academy Award Regulations].

A week or so after the announcement, the Academy mails final ballots to all Academy members. Members have two weeks to return the ballots. PricewaterhouseCoopers tabulates the votes in absolute secrecy and seals the results. Accountants at PwC have overseen the Oscars' voting process for over 80 years, but after the Best Picture mishap at the 2017 Oscars (where the handing over of the wrong envelope led to "La La Land" being announced as Best Picture when it was really "Moonlight"), the Academy's board of governors held a meeting to determine whether to continue with them. In the end, they ultimately decided to continue their partnership with PwC [sources: Feinberg, Miller].

While ballots are cast and counted, production companies are sinking considerable funds into campaigning for their contenders. The Academy condones any efforts to get Academy members to see the films, but restricts production companies from mailing out inappropriate incentives. Production companies are allowed to send Academy members video copies of contender films, and to organize special screenings of their films.

Is it Really a Secret?

In the Academy's early years, the award winners were announced the night before the ceremony. This allowed newspapers to have the winners listed in the late-night editions that would go out on the night of the Oscars after the winners had been announced [source: Ramisetti]. However, newspapers began printing the Oscar edition earlier in the evening, and by 1940, ceremony guests could pick up a paper and find out who won while on their way to the ceremony. Perhaps sensing that this early notification would bring an end to people actually attending the ceremony, and to add suspense, the Academy began keeping results in the sealed envelopes that we know today. Now, when the Oscar presenter says, "and the Oscar goes to," we're all finding out at the same time.