On March 15, 2026, Los Angeles hosted the Oscars ceremony honoring films from 2025. Among the main winners were two movies widely seen as season favorites: Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Battle After Battle.”
“Sinners” won awards for best actor, original screenplay, cinematography, and original score. “Battle After Battle” took the remaining top prizes, including best picture, directing, adapted screenplay, casting, editing, and best supporting actor. Against that backdrop, film critic Katya Stepnaya explains how the Academy’s voting system actually works and why it is misleading to attribute its decisions simply to “wokeness” or political messaging.
The awards are presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded in 1927. It now includes about 10,000 voting members from across the industry: actors, directors, cinematographers, writers, editors, composers, and many other professionals. Those members choose the winners, not a small jury, television executives, or the ceremony’s producers.
At the nomination stage, voting follows professional lines: actors nominate actors, directors vote for directors, editors for editors, and so on. The only exception is best picture, where all Academy members participate. Once the nominees are set, the final round begins, and then all members can vote in every category.
A special procedure applies to best picture, where the Academy uses preferential voting. Members rank films in order of preference, and if no title receives a majority of first-place votes, ballots are redistributed until one film secures a majority. The system is designed to produce a broad consensus winner, which is why that category often yields less predictable results.
Vote counting has been handled for nearly a century by Price Waterhouse Coopers. The firm verifies ballots, counts the results, and prepares the sealed envelopes with the winners’ names; before the ceremony, only two auditors know the outcome. Reports about “leaked ballots” are usually not actual document leaks but anonymous interviews in trade publications where Academy members discuss their personal choices.
The article also points to studio For Your Consideration campaigns, which involve large promotional budgets. Studios arrange screenings and events with filmmakers and actors, but Academy rules prohibit direct requests to vote for a specific film, attacks on competitors, or gifts. In recent years, oversight of film viewing has also increased through the secure Academy Screening Room platform.
Stepnaya concludes that Oscar voting does have patterns linked to industry sentiment and the cultural moment, but that does not amount to a hidden conspiracy. To engineer a result, one would have to coordinate thousands of people from different countries, generations, and professions. In that sense, Oscar outcomes reflect the collective taste of a large professional community, which may or may not match audience expectations.