Can Oscar Voters Be Trusted? Plus This Year’s Acting Underdogs

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.

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Ballots are now in the hands — or laptops, actually — of the nearly 10,000 eligible voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they have only this weekend and a few days after until March 5 to turn in their individual verdicts.

That comes after a long season where the impact of the Oscar race has stretched out almost a full year if you consider that Sinners, with an all-time record 16 Oscar nominations, opened April 17, 2025, almost 11 months to the day of the 98th annual Academy Awards taking place on March 15, 2026. Then you had Cannes way back in May, when four of the five nominees for Best International Feature made their world premieres — including two Best Picture nominees in Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, which between them represent 13 nominations overall. And then in June, Apple and Warner Bros unveiled F1, another Best Picture nominee. Finally what is considered the “official” start of Oscar season came around with the fall-festival trifecta of Venice/Telluride/Toronto and the 6 1/2-month campaigns began in earnest. But don’t kid yourself, this has become a year-round adventure.

So now it is all up to the voters who have a new wrinkle in the process this year. They are supposed to swear under oath that they have seen all the movies they are voting on. Okay, that may be an exaggeration. AMPAS members don’t have to “swear under oath”, they simply have to attest to the fact that they have actually either viewed the nominees in a theatre or on the Academy’s digital screening room (where technology can affirm the film was played, if not actually watched by the voter in question), or have seen it by some other method. Essentially this is all on the honor system and was needed because it has become all too apparent that just a very few of those films eligible for Oscars in any given year are really being seen by large swaths of voters, and by extension having a fighting chance of being nominated. The Television Academy has done this in various ways, also on the honor system, but in some years fortified with signed affadavits for each category.

This new system was developed to try and encourage members to watch the movies they are given the task of voting on. The trend has been fewer films dominating the nominations and the numbers bear that out indicating voters are only concentrating on a few titles. Excluding the three short films and Documentary feature categories, there are a mere 30 film titles stretched over 20 categories this year out of 317 feature films eligible. Of that number half of the 30 represent just a single nomination. If you eliminate Animated Feature and Makeup/Hairstyling you would have just 8 films with a single nom making the gap even wider in 18 key categories. That means there are a mere 15 films that received more than one nomination, a strong indication, as has been also true in the recent past, that a paltry number of movies are taking up most of the oxygen, a point proven just by looking at most categories and seeing the same few films listed over and over.

What all this says is that in the democracy known as the Motion Picture Academy there are realistically few ways to break in and upset the applecart. Unless you have a big campaign, or a distributor hell bent on making a mark such as Neon which buys up every winner in Cannes and winds up with four of the five International Film nominees, what chance do you have to get through to these voters? In asking for transparency from its members, in hoping for honesty, the Academy is clearly aware this has become a contest for the haves and the have nots, and maybe, just maybe by adding the intimidation level of “requiring” their members to see the movies before voting it can begin to make a difference in the level playing field of the winners, and going forward the nominees. For now though it is just a few who will share the glory on Oscar night. And by the way it is no wonder that David Ellison was so bound and determined to succeed in taking over Warner Bros. It is sad that Paramount, a once great player in this sandbox, has an embarrassing zero nominations (even with the shamefully under-seen Roofman produced in part by the Academy’s current President Lynette Howell Taylor) and Warners has 30 and shares in another 4 for distributing Apple’s F1. If you can’t beat ’em, buy them.

SALUTE TO OSCAR’S UNDERDOGS – CLASS OF ’25

All of this brings me to the true underdogs who are hoping for a miracle come Oscar night and counting on voters to see their films before sending in a ballot, those one-hit wonders, those single nominations that somehow overcame the odds and got recognition from their peers despite the fact they were in a movie that didn’t register with the Academy otherwise. Let’s look at the acting categories where a whopping 11 of the 20 acting nominees come from only 3 films, that’s right 3 , count ’em, 3 films: One Battle After Another with 4, Sentimental Value with 4, and Sinners with 3.

The Academy smartly lets the individual branches vote for nominations, but in the finals taking place now until next Thursday, it is the entire Academy that gets to vote in every category (provided they verify they have seen the nominees — see the beginning of this column for details). That means those acting nominees coming from those 3 films with a combined total 38 nominations overall have a distinct advantage of being seen by all members, not just the branch that invited them to the party. And 5 of the other acting nominees are also in multi-nominated movies that have all been nominated in Best Picture, a huge advantage.

So is there any hope, any hope at all, for those not in a Best Picture nominee and therefore tilting at windmills, climbing the highest mountain, trying to defeat the odds, but praying the new rule designed to make voters testify they see you really works. If it does, can we reasonably expect that Ethan Hawke, Kate Hudson, Rose Byrne, and Amy Madigan have a fighting chance?

Hawke has won widespread praise for his portrayal of musical genius Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon but his, along with Best Original Screenplay, is just one of two nominations for the movie from Sony Pictures Classics which is not waging the kind of money-ed campaign going for the likes of DiCaprio, Chalamet, and Jordan in more widely seen movies than this terrific little indie. Hawke has, out of necessity, been out there stumping (check out my current Actor’s Side video interview with him on Deadline) but is it enough? I have talked to voters who bring his name up voluntarily, a good sign, but how many have seen it?

Hudson, so great in Song Sung Blue continues to get a robust campaign with billboards and TV ads from Focus Features, but she is up against front runner Jessie Buckley in Hamnet getting even a bigger campaign from the same distributor, and hers is the sole nomination for her film so its a long shot here, but never say never because 25 years exactly since her first nomination for Almost Famous there is a lot of hometown goodwill for her at work. Facing the same odds, but not having nearly the kind of visible campaign support (ala tv, billboards, etc) from A24 , Byrne is hoping to ride wins at the Golden Globes and Indie Spirits, as well as deep respect in the industry to turn her first Best Actress nomination for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You into Oscar gold, again a tough assignment since it is the single recognition for the movie that premiered at Sundance 13 months ago, this despite the fact that her co-star Conan O’Brien is again hosting the Academy Awards. He however does not control which names are in the envelopes.

Finally in the Supporting categories every single nominee except one out of the ten is also in a more widely seen Best Picture nominee. That lone person is veteran Amy Madigan up for Supporting Actress in Weapons, it’s only nomination, and in the running again only 40 years since her first and only previous nomination for 1985’s Twice In A Lifetime. This achievement is close to a near record in term of gaps between nominations (Judd Hirsch still holds it at 42 years). The Critics Choice winner is looking for momentum from this weekend’s Actor Awards but it is still a steep climb, not to mention Weapons being a horror movie and the kind of role that rarely wins Oscars. She’s brilliant in it, so again IF they watched she might have a fighting chance.

To give you an idea of the long odds facing these acting nominees in lesser-seen performances, Forest Whitaker was the last to take home Best Actor on the single nomination for Last King Of Scotland in 2006. Julianne Moore in Still Alice was the last to do it in 2014 in the Best Actress category. Christopher Plummer pulled off the feat in 2013 for Beginners, and then before that it was Jack Palance 39 years after his first nomination for Shane in 1991’s City Slickers. These were all veteran stars long overdue.

In Supporting Actress Penelope Cruz won as the sole nominee for her 2007 film, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, but then Woody Allen films had a long track record of delivering in this category. Winning on a single nomination has become so rare that when Marisa Tomei did it for 1992’s My Cousin Vinny, a March release no less, it was considered, even then, so unlikely that a conspiracy theory lives on to this day suggesting that presenter Palance read off the wrong name.

Still there is always hope, especially with new guidelines urging voters to watch the movies, so best of luck to all of you.

Oscar voting continues through Thursday March 5 at 5pm PT. The 98th Annual Academy Awards airs on ABC and Hulu at 4:00pm pt/7:00pm et Sunday March 15, 2026.