Oscars 2025: How the 'Best Picture' winner is chosen at the Academy Awards?
How is the Best Picture winner decided at the Oscars 2025? Learn about the Academy Awards' voting process, ranked-choice system, and what influences the final selection.
The Oscars 2025 are right around the corner, and film fans worldwide are eager to see which movie will take home the Best Picture award. But how exactly does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decide the winner?
The Academy Awards follow a straightforward voting system for most categories—whoever gets the most votes wins. However, when it comes to Best Picture, the selection process is much more complex.
If you've ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at the Academy Awards, here’s everything you need to know.
How does Oscar voting work for most categories?
For the majority of Academy Award categories, voting is simple and direct:
- Each Academy member votes for their preferred nominee.
- The nominee with the most votes wins the Oscar.
However, the Best Picture category follows a different approach, which the Academy calls the “fairest possible” method.
'Best Picture' voting: The ranked-choice system explained
The Best Picture winner is not chosen by a simple majority vote. Instead, the Academy uses a system called ranked-choice voting, also known as a preferential ballot.
These are the nominees for Best Picture. Photo: 6ABC
How it works:
- Academy members rank all Best Picture nominees in order of preference, from their first-choice pick to their least favorite.
- Ballots are sorted by first-choice votes, with each movie getting its own pile.
- If a film secures more than 50% of first-choice votes, it automatically wins Best Picture.
- If no film reaches the 50% threshold in the first round, the process continues in elimination rounds.
ALSO SEE: Oscars 2025: ‘Wicked’ stars Ariana Grande & Cynthia Erivo set to perform live on broadcast
The elimination process: How a film wins 'Best Picture'
Since Best Picture nominees rarely get 50% of the votes in the first round, the Academy follows an elimination process:
- The film with the fewest No. 1 votes is eliminated.
- Ballots from the eliminated film are redistributed to the voter’s second-choice pick.
- This process continues round by round, eliminating the film with the lowest votes and redistributing ballots, until one film reaches 50% of the total votes.
The 'Best Picture' category is the only one with a different voting system
Example scenario:
- If "Emilia Pérez" gets the fewest first-place votes, it is eliminated.
- Voters who ranked "Emilia Pérez" No. 1 will have their votes reassigned to their second-choice film.
- If their second choice was "Anora," those ballots are added to the "Anora" pile.
- The process repeats until a film secures over 50% of the total ballots and is crowned Best Picture winner.
ALSO SEE: Oscars 2025: Full list of nominees for the 97th Academy Awards – See who’s in the running!
Why the Academy uses this system?
The ranked-choice voting method ensures that the Best Picture winner is not just a divisive favorite but a film that is widely liked by a majority of voters.
- It prevents polarizing films from winning simply because they had the most No. 1 votes.
- It helps identify a film with broad appeal, rather than one that appeals only to a niche group of voters.
The ranked-choice voting system may be more complicated than a simple majority vote, but it ensures that the Best Picture winner represents the consensus favorite among Academy members.
As the Oscars 2025 approach, understanding how voting works can give movie fans better insight into what it really takes for a film to take home the biggest prize of the night.