From who gets to nominate, to why Best Picture is counted differently, here is how the Academy Awards voting system works ahead of Sunday night's ceremony, and how a new rule on film viewing could affect the final ballot.
The Oscars can often look simple from the outside. Nominees are announced, Academy members vote, and the winners are revealed on the night.
In reality, the process is more complicated than that, with different rules for nominations, different rules again for the final round, and special procedures for some categories. This year, there is also a notable change, with Academy members now required to watch all nominated films in a category before they can vote in that category in the final round.
Watch: Sinead Courtney explains the Oscars voting system in under a minute
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is made up of thousands of film professionals working across 19 branches, from acting and directing to writing, editing, sound, and visual effects. Oscars voting is carried out by a secret online ballot, with the results tabulated by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
For most categories, the nominations are decided by members of the relevant branch. Actors nominate actors, directors nominate directors, and writers nominate writers. Best Picture is the main exception, because eligible members from all 19 branches can take part in choosing those nominees. Some categories also have their own special rules around who can vote and when.
For the 98th Academy Awards, nominations voting opened on 12 January and closed on 16 January, with the nominations announced on 22 January. Final voting then opened on 26 February and closed on 5 March, ahead of the ceremony on Sunday, 15 March.
The biggest talking point this year is the Academy's new viewing requirement. In April 2025, the Academy confirmed that members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars.
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That is a significant change because it addresses a question that has followed awards season for years: how many voters have actually seen everything they are voting on? The Academy's new rule is clearly intended to make that part of the process more rigorous, even if it is impossible from the outside to know exactly how much difference it will make to the final results.
At the same time, the idea is not entirely new. Some categories already had stricter viewing requirements in place. The Academy's rules for International Feature Film, for example, say final voting is restricted to members who have viewed all five nominated films. Similar rules have applied in some other specialist races too.
Once nominations are locked, the final round works differently. All eligible Academy members can vote in all 24 categories, rather than only in their own branch. That means actors, editors, directors, composers, and craftspeople all help decide the eventual winners across the board.
Most winners are decided by the nominee with the most votes, but Best Picture is treated differently. That category uses a preferential voting system, which means voters rank the nominees in order of preference rather than simply picking one. If no film wins an outright majority of first-place votes, the title with the fewest is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed until one film emerges with enough support.
That is one reason Best Picture can sometimes produce a result that feels a little different from the rest of the night. While acting, directing, and craft categories are generally about who finishes first, Best Picture is designed to reward the film with the broadest support across the Academy. That is an interpretation of how the system works, rather than a phrase used by the Academy itself, but it is the practical effect of preferential voting.
So, in simple terms, the road to an Oscar works like this: branch members help choose the nominees, the full Academy then votes on the winners, and this year those final-round voters are under a clearer obligation to have watched the contenders before casting their ballots.
Whether that change materially affects the outcome is impossible to know. What is clear is that it represents one of the most significant procedural updates in recent years, just as the race for the 98th Academy Awards reaches its final stretch.
The 98th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O'Brien, will be shown live on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player from 11:00pm on Sunday, 15 March, and the ceremony will also air on RTÉ2 on Monday evening from 9:30pm.
