Oscars 2022 voting rules explained
THE Oscars are back for another year and the 2022 ceremony will be the 94th Academy Awards.
The winners are voted for through a very tight system that is made up of members of the film business.
Who votes for the Oscar winners?
The votes are cast by The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The Academy is made up of 8,000 individuals who are described as “accomplished men and women working in cinema".
The group is composed of actors, producers, directors, writers and all kinds of other high-ranking members of the film industry.
The identity of the members is a closely guarded secret.
How does the voting system for the Oscars work?
Members of the Academy can only vote within their own field in the first round of voting.
In other words, members who are actors can only vote for actors, directors can only vote for directors, producers only for producers, and so on.
More on the Oscars 2022
Not only that, the voting slip encourages people to vote for whatever film they like and are asked to give five choices in order of preference.
Voting begins in January and is done either through paper or online ballot, and the nominations are dwindled down to the official nominees.
From there, there's another round of voting that goes right up a few days before the event.
The votes are counted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, who then work to determine who has won what.
How is Best Picture Oscar voting different?
Unlike the other categories, anyone in the Academy can vote for Best Picture.
A movie must receive more than 50% of the vote to win.
However, if no film achieves this amount of first-place votes, then the least successful one is removed from the running and the votes it garnered are redistributed to the ballot’s second choice.
This process then continues, with the last-placed film being cut and its votes being re-allocated, until a film gains the necessary majority to win.