Who actually votes for the Oscars, how the campaign works, and why the prize is more politically constructed than it sometimes appears.
The Oscars ceremony each March is the highest-profile film prize in the world. The process by which the Oscars are actually decided is, by general public understanding, opaque. This essay walks through how the Academy Awards actually work — the membership, the voting structure, the campaign infrastructure, the recent reforms — and what the prize is and isn't measuring.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded in 1927 as an industry trade organisation with a secondary award-ceremony function. It is, structurally, a professional society organised into 18 branches by craft category — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, sound mixers, visual effects supervisors, and so on. As of 2026, the Academy has approximately 11,500 voting members.
Membership requires either two existing-member sponsors or specific professional achievement (an Oscar nomination, for example, qualifies the nominee for invitation). Members vote for nominees in their own branch (directors vote for Best Director nominees, writers for Best Screenplay nominees, etc.) and for Best Picture nominees across all branches. The final winners in all categories are determined by votes from the entire membership.
Until the mid-2010s, the Academy membership was overwhelmingly white (roughly 90%), male (roughly 75%), and significantly older than the general American moviegoing audience (average member age in the late 60s). Two consecutive #OscarsSoWhite ceremonies in 2015 and 2016 — in which no actors of colour were nominated in any of the four acting categories — produced public pressure for membership reform.
The Academy responded with a multi-year initiative that added approximately 3,000 new members between 2016 and 2020 — disproportionately women, people of colour, and international members. The expansion has, by measurable outcome, changed what wins. The post-2020 Best Picture winners include Parasite (the first non-English Best Picture), Nomadland (first female-Asian Best Director), CODA (a deaf-cast lead), Everything Everywhere All at Once (the first A24 Best Picture), and Oppenheimer (the most conventionally-Oscars film of the recent set).
Nominations for most categories are decided by the relevant branch. Best Picture nominations use a preferential ballot system — voters rank their top five films, and the surplus first-place votes redistribute to second choices until a slate of 10 nominees emerges. This system was introduced in 2009 and is structurally different from the simple-majority approach used in other branches.
Final winners in all categories except Best Picture are determined by simple plurality — the film or person with the most first-place votes wins. Best Picture, however, uses a preferential ballot in the final voting round as well. The winning film is the one that accumulates the most cumulative support across all members' rankings, not necessarily the film that wins the most first-place votes. This is structurally important: a film that is universally a strong second choice can beat a film that is divisively a strong first choice.
The Oscar campaign is, structurally, an industry within an industry. Studios spend roughly $20-50m on the campaign for a serious Best Picture contender. The spending goes toward: targeted screening events for Academy members in Los Angeles, New York, and London; for-your-consideration mailings (often physical screeners, increasingly digital codes); trade-publication advertising in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Indiewire; press tours featuring the director and lead actors; awards-circuit prizes (Golden Globes, SAG, BAFTAs, PGA, DGA, WGA) that build narrative momentum toward Oscar night.
The campaign infrastructure has been criticised for decades as effectively buying Oscar wins for studios that can afford the spending. The defence is that the structural campaigning is competitive — every serious contender does it, and the spending mostly cancels out. The criticism is that small-budget independent films and foreign-language films are structurally disadvantaged because their distributors cannot match major-studio campaign budgets. Both arguments are partly correct."],
The Best Picture Oscar measures, by structural design, the consensus opinion of the Academy's voting membership at the time of voting. The prize is not, strictly speaking, an objective measure of cinematic quality. It is a sociological measurement of a specific industry organisation's collective taste.
This has changed across decades as the membership has changed. The Academy of 1990 was significantly more conservative than the Academy of 2025. The films that win Best Picture have shifted accordingly. The 2020s Best Picture winners would, by general critical consensus, have been unimaginable to the 1990 Academy. The 1990 winners (Driving Miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves) would have been unlikely to win in the 2020s Academy. The prize is, in some sense, a moving target rather than a fixed assessment.
For more on the changing Academy, see our essay on why foreign films are finally winning Best Picture.