In a perfect world, every Academy voter would watch every nominated movie before casting their final Oscar ballots. But as those horrendous anonymous interviews with voters that the trades publish each year have shown us, that is rarely the case. As one voter told The Hollywood Reporter of the films up for best animated feature in 2023: “I watched at least part of all of them—a couple of them in their entirety—and I didn’t really give a shit about any of them.”
The Academy is hoping to fix this problem with a new set of rules announced Monday. The board of governors says members must now watch “all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars.” This rule pertains only to the final round of voting after nominations, and means that any voter who has not watched all the nominated movies will not be able to vote in that specific category. “I applaud the Academy because it’s a positive step,” says one Academy member. “They needed to do something.”
But the announcement didn’t include information about how exactly this requirement will be enforced. Many Academy members watch Oscar-nominated films through the members-only Academy Screening Room streaming app, which should make viewing much easier to track than it was in the DVD screener days. If a member sees a film in another way, such as at a guild screening, at a festival, or in a movie theater with the rest of us, they’ll reportedly have to fill out and submit a form stating when and where they watched a film.
This new system would be similar to what BAFTA voters have been using for several years. If a BAFTA voter does not watch all the films in any given category, that category will essentially be “greyed out” on their e-ballot when they go to vote.
In the past, the Academy has had a similar requirement for those voting in the preliminary and nomination rounds for certain categories—like animated, live action, and documentary shorts. But this is the first time the Academy has made a viewing requirement for all voters in all categories, speaking to how high a priority it is. Some Academy members tell Vanity Fair that they already don’t vote in categories where they haven’t seen the films, but they know that’s not the case for everyone. “I’m always shocked to find out how many people voted in categories where they had only seen one film,” said another voter.
In part, this new rule is one way for the organization to get a handle on a membership that has ballooned from 5,765 voting members in 2012 to nearly 10,000 now. The group’s more international and younger makeup has given many members a growing feeling that such a large group of voters may not be watching everything. Failing to see every movie can lead to coattail voting, in which a voter simply marks a single frontrunner over and over down their ballot. Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All at Once, for example, both won seven Oscars each, including best picture—hauls that could have been inflated because most voters may have actually watched each of those films.
The Academy often announces rules in the spring that reflect on the biggest issues of the most recent Oscar season. This year, the organization also announced new rules about the use of AI (after last year’s controversy surrounding The Brutalist) and a stricter deadline for films to get their PGA credits sorted (due to the overwhelming number of best-picture contenders this past year whose nominees were listed as “nominees to be determined”). But the concern about voters not watching all the movies in a category has been a growing issue for the past few years, sources tell Vanity Fair.
Because Academy members are still allowed to self-report public or guild screenings, this is still in many ways an honor system—and there might likely be plenty of ways for crafty voters to get around this new requirement. Could you leave a movie playing on the Academy site while you clean your house? Sure. Could you fast-forward through the last hour of a three-and-a-half-hour epic that you don’t want to finish? Probably. Could you say you attended a screening at the Grove AMC when you really didn’t? Seems likely.
But if you’re going to go through all that trouble just to game the system, maybe your energy would be better spent actually watching the movies. It’s an honor just to be nominated—but it’s an even bigger honor to have your film literally seen by Academy voters.
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