Film awards explained: Oscars, BAFTAs, Cannes and how voting works
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Awards season comes round every year with the same questions: who decides, how does voting work, and why did that film win? The big film awards work in quite different ways. Some are decided by thousands of industry members voting in rounds; others by a small jury behind closed doors.
The recurring awards calendar
The pattern repeats each year, though exact dates move:
- Festivals run throughout the year. Cannes is normally held in May, and Venice, Toronto and others follow in late summer and autumn, where many awards contenders first appear.
- Critics' prizes and guild awards from groups of directors, producers, actors and other professionals arrive over the winter and are watched as signs of how industry voters are leaning.
- The BAFTA Film Awards in London and the Academy Awards (the Oscars) in Los Angeles come at the end of the season, usually in the first months of the year, honouring films released in the previous year.
Each award has its own eligibility rules, such as a qualifying cinema release in a particular period. Check the official rules for the current year rather than assuming they are unchanged.
The Oscars: voting by branch, then by everyone
The Oscars are presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose voting members are film professionals organised into branches such as actors, directors, cinematographers and editors.
- Nominations: in most categories, only members of the relevant branch nominate. Actors nominate actors, editors nominate editors. Best Picture is the exception: every voting member can nominate for it. A few categories open nominations to volunteers from other branches.
- Final voting: all voting members may vote in every category.
- Viewing rule: under a rule introduced for recent ceremonies, members must watch all the nominated films in a category to be eligible to vote in that category's final round.
- Counting: in most categories, the nominee with the most votes wins. Best Picture uses a preferential, ranked ballot: voters rank all the nominees, and if no film has a majority of first choices, the film with the fewest is eliminated and its ballots pass to each voter's next choice, until one film passes half. This favours a film with broad support rather than one that a passionate minority loves. Ballots are counted by an independent accountancy firm.
The Best Picture shortlist is longer than other categories; in recent years it has had ten nominees.
The BAFTAs: rounds, chapters and compulsory viewing
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts runs its film awards in three rounds.
- Round one (longlisting): to give smaller films a fair hearing, voters are each allocated a random selection of films to watch, then vote to produce longlists.
- Round two (nominations): voters must watch every longlisted film in a category before voting. Many craft categories are decided by chapters, groups of members with expertise in that craft, while some categories use juries. Best Film is voted on by the full film-voting membership.
- Round three (winners): the film-voting membership chooses the winners.
BAFTA reviews its rules regularly, so the exact numbers on each list can change from one cycle to the next.
Cannes: a jury decides
The Cannes Film Festival works differently. A selection committee chooses the films in competition, and a small jury of filmmakers, actors and other artists, led by a jury president, watches them during the festival. The jury deliberates in private and announces its prizes, including the Palme d'Or, its top award, at the closing ceremony. There are no public vote counts. Venice and Berlin use similar juries for their top prizes, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear.
Because a jury is a handful of people, a festival result can be more personal and surprising than an industry-wide vote.
Why winners can surprise
- Large electorates reward broad consensus; juries reward strong conviction.
- Campaigning by distributors, including screenings and interviews, raises a film's profile with voters.
- Different rules and memberships mean the same film can triumph at one ceremony and be overlooked at another.
Which awards result do you think got it most right, or most wrong? Share your view in the comments.