2025 Oscar nominations: How is ranked choice voting used?
Following an historic election season, ranked choice voting (RCV) is back in the public eye this month – as it will be used for the 2025 Oscar nominations on January 23, and again to select the Best Picture winner on March 10.
The 2025 Oscar nominations – which have been delayed several days because of the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles – are a reminder that RCV is used in many places and contexts beyond public elections. RCV is recommended in Robert’s Rules of Order, and is commonly used in elections for well-known associations. (To learn more about how RCV is used to pick the Best Picture winner, check out FairVote’s explainer from last Oscar season.)
Here are a few things to know about RCV and the Academy Awards:
The gold standard
Because there are multiple nominees in every category – 10 for Best Picture, and 5 for other categories like Best Actor and Actress – the Oscars use the multi-winner, proportional form of RCV for nominations. This “gold standard” form of RCV is the basis of the Fair Representation Act, and is used in public elections in cities like Portland, OR; Cambridge, MA; and Albany, CA. Read more about Portland’s historic first use of RCV here.
Why is multi-winner, proportional RCV the gold standard? It ensures that winners (or in this case, nominees) are chosen in proportion to the share of votes cast, and that nearly all voters will help elect a candidate or nominee they support. In other words, proportional RCV is how to make a representative body truly, well… representative.
In the 5-nominee categories, at least 85% of Academy voters will see a film or person of their choice nominated. In the Best Picture category, that number is above 90%.
The impact of proportional RCV shows in the diversity of recent Oscar nominees. Among last year’s Best Picture nominees alone, it’s incredible that the same group of voters nominated both blockbuster hit Barbie and arthouse dramedy American Fiction, two films with tones that couldn’t be more different.
But that’s the point. The nominees represent voters who like sweeping historical dramas, voters who like uplifting comedies, and voters who like films with powerful social commentary. They don’t just represent whatever group happens to be largest, to the exclusion of all other groups that should have their voices heard. This creates a scenario where films as different as Dune: Part Two and Anora could be nominated for Best Picture this year.
Together with reforms to the Academy after the #OscarsSoWhite scandal in the mid-2010s, proportional RCV also supports greater racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among nominees.
The impact of RCV on the Oscars
Over his 16 years at the Academy, Tom Oyer was responsible for expanding the use of proportional RCV and implementing rules changes in a number of awards categories. FairVote spoke with Oyer ahead of the 2024 Oscars about the positive impact RCV has had, both on the Academy Awards and on the Academy itself.
“[RCV is] getting the preferences of a variety of different groups of people that have very different opinions,” Oyer said. “And so, a lot of times I hear from a lot of members that don’t necessarily agree with all the nominees, but you can tell that at least one, if not more of their choices, probably did get nominated.”
Oyer also shared that RCV lets members vote honestly for films they truly like – which could be a breath of fresh air for nearly half of voters who feel they voted for the “lesser of two evils” in 2024:
Rather than having a method where… [you’re voting] against something, it was about shifting it to being more about voting in the affirmative, voting for the ones that you love, the ones that you respond to.
RCV isn’t just used for the Oscars; the Academy implemented it in 2020 for internal elections for its Board of Governors, as part of a package of several reforms. As Oyer noted:
[The Board of Governors] became a female-majority board for the first time in its history upon the implementation of ranked choice voting. You know, that was a really amazing thing to see happen.
Hollywood leads the way
Keep an eye out: When the Academy adopted the single-winner form of ranked choice voting to select Best Picture winners in 2009, just five American cities used that better election system. But Hollywood is a trend-setter, and RCV started to grow in the years after the Oscars adopted it. RCV ramped up like some of the best thrillers – slow (up to about 10 cities by 2016), and then very fast (now in 51 cities, counties, and states)!
We’re looking forward to the 2025 Oscar nominations next week. Stay tuned for future analysis on how RCV will be used to pick the Best Picture winner in March!