Oscars 2026: How is ranked choice voting used?
Ranked choice voting (RCV) isn’t just used to elect candidates and government officials. RCV will be used for most Academy Award nominations on January 22, and again to select the Best Picture winner at the Oscars on March 15.
The Oscars are one of the most high-profile uses of ranked choice voting outside of public elections. RCV is commonly used in elections for well-known associations, and a form of RCV is also used to choose the winners of most major sports awards – like the Heisman Trophy and upcoming NFL Awards.
Below are a few quick things to know about RCV and the Academy Awards. You can learn even more in this conversation with Tom Oyer, former senior vice president of member relations and awards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The gold standard at the Oscars
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 from Portland, OR to Charlottesville, VA.
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 ensures that a representative body is actually representative.
Look at the diversity of recent Oscar nominees compared to other awards shows. Among last year’s Best Picture nominees alone, the smash-hit musical Wicked and the experimental, small-budget, historical drama Nickel Boys likely appealed to very different “constituencies”. Same with Dune: Part Two, with its reported $190 million budget, and Anora, which cost $6 million to make.
But that’s exactly the point. The nominees represent voters who like big-production musicals, voters who like sci-fi treks through the desert, and voters who prefer arthouse dramas. (Remember this concept if both Sinners and Hamnet are nominated for Best Picture on Thursday!)
Together with reforms to the Oscars after the #OscarsSoWhite scandal in the mid-2010s – like doubling the number of the Academy’s female members, tripling the number of the Academy’s members of color, and a new effort requiring film productions to meet inclusion standards to compete for Best Picture – proportional RCV also supports greater racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among nominees.
We’re looking forward to the nominations on Thursday. Read more here about how Oscar voters use ranked choice voting to select the Best Picture, and check back for an update once this year’s winner is chosen in March!
