The Terrible Burden of Actually Watching Oscar Contenders

The Atlantic

15-05-2025

There's faking it 'til you make it, and then there's faking it for years after you've already made it. Some Oscar voters who've long since made it into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have apparently embraced the latter. Last month, the elite film-industry group announced a new rule for the final round of voting for next year's Oscar winners. Academy members must now watch all of the films before casting their ballots—all of them, all the way through.
That might seem like an obvious rule for voters of any award: View the works you're judging. But when I recently spoke with several Academy members about the new condition, the lack of consensus about how to judge a movie was striking.
'I am the first one to be on that list of people who don't watch everything,' one film editor in the Academy told me. (All of my interview subjects in the Academy requested anonymity to speak candidly about their own behavior or the Academy's conduct.) ' Wicked is totally uninteresting. I know I'm not going to vote for it, and I didn't really watch it,' she added, referring to the Wizard of Oz prequel that was nominated for Best Picture this year. 'I can only watch the things I'm interested in. Otherwise, for me, it's a waste of my time.' The new rule won't change her habits, she told me. 'I know what I like. I know what I don't like. If I start it and watch 10, 15 minutes and know I'm not going to vote for it, I'll just continue 'Play,' but I might not watch it. I'm just gonna walk away.'
What exactly have the Academy's voting members been doing for the past nearly 100 years? Members have been encouraged to give all nominees a fair shake, but—aside from a few specialized categories—were not explicitly required to see a movie in competition from opening sequence to closing credits. Under the new system, to have their final-round ballots unlocked and counted, voters will have to either watch each nominee from start to finish via the Academy's private screening app or complete a form attesting to where and when they saw the film (if at an external venue).
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Some members I spoke with pointed out that the rule reform lacked teeth—if voters are willing to lie about having seen a movie at a festival or at the theater. 'The Academy can't track you,' one director in the Academy told me, 'and you can just tick it off.' The Academy's app isn't foolproof either. Voters can leave the movie running while cooking dinner or answering emails. But the point is that the Academy's honor system will now include the jeopardy of dishonor for cheating—given the theoretical risk of being caught in a lie.
One documentarian in the Academy told me that some tightening up was needed, but requiring voters to sit through all of the films in full was asking too much: 'Filmmakers know very quickly whether something that they're watching is really special,' he told me. 'What is watching a film? Is it watching the first 25 minutes of a film? Does that count? Or do you have to get all the way through?' If we decide to award an Oscar for the Best Opening 25 Minutes, perhaps we can all agree that Saving Private Ryan deserves one retroactively.
Other members disagreed that filmmakers can distinguish greatness from mediocrity so quickly. The new rule should have come out a 'long time back,' the director told me. So why did the update come only now? 'Not a lot of people saw The Brutalist in its entirety,' he said. The film took home three Academy Awards. Perhaps some of the Academy's members felt they didn't need to sit through the three-and-a-half-hour run time (plus a 15-minute intermission in theaters) and come to an independent view of their own, because the Golden Globes voters had already garlanded the film with three of their biggest awards a few weeks before the Oscars. (The Academy declined my request for comment.) 'The year-end films are Oscar-bait movies,' the director said—meaning they come late enough to be fresh in the voters' memory but early enough to accrue critical buzz.
'I made it through 45 minutes,' another documentary maker in the Academy told me. Watching it was 'a big ask.' A composer in the Academy, one of two I spoke with, told me that voters skipping the hours-long Brutalist was an open secret among his peers: 'Several people were like, 'I can't. I started it and I couldn't finish.'' Its success considering its scant viewership 'was definitely a head-scratcher to me and most of my friends,' he said.
The Brutalist was not the first film in Academy history to win more acclaim than viewing minutes. According to the director I spoke with, the 2022 four-Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front was also scarcely watched by voters. Nodding off early makes for a reliable verdict too. 'I fell asleep during Conclave,' the documentary maker confessed.
The obvious question: How do movies that many Academy members find unwatchable end up being nominated for, or even winning, the highest honors in the industry? From my conversations with Academy members, one answer emerged: If not everyone who votes has time—or makes time—to watch every movie in full, an army of publicists is ready to capitalize on time-crunched voters' suggestibility.
The 2025 Best Picture winner, Anora, made headlines after its studio spent a good chunk of its $18 million marketing budget—triple the film's $6 million production cost—on its Oscars campaign, which included selling a line of film-branded red thongs. Generating word-of-mouth excitement among a body of 10,000 movie insiders is an expensive but crucial part of the game. The other composer in the Academy I spoke with told me that bigger-budget films have been known to co-host a private concert for Oscar voters at L.A.'s Royce Hall theater that is essentially 'a cocktail party with drinks and hors d'oeuvres' to showcase their nominated score's composer. 'You're basically at a campaign rally for very few films,' he said.
The first composer told me that 'when Barbie was a nominee, the year before last, Warner Bros. put on so many events.' He offered a blunt appraisal of how Academy voting works: 'It certainly isn't whether or not we watch the films. It's the extent to which we are being wined and dined'—then adding, 'Not wined and dined, but given access.' Particularly in determining votes for more niche award categories, film publicists play a big role. 'There's so much competition,' he said. Some people would consider the choices 'overwhelming, and want to be told what to vote for.' (Members are not, of course, under any obligation to vote in every category.)
Although Academy members tended to see the rule change as a housekeeping fix, online cynics read it as a confession of fraud and corruption. The controversy has put a spotlight on the gap between what the Oscars strives to be and what it actually is. Instead of celebrating what makes cinema great, it's made intra-Hollywood intrigue visible to the general public. 'What's fascinating,' William Stribling, a filmmaker who is not an Academy member, told me, 'is that the public and moviegoing audiences are so heavily invested in this thing, which is really an internal, industry-celebrating-industry event.'
By trying to make the Oscars fairer, the Academy inadvertently revealed that the award business hasn't been all that fair to begin with. But perhaps that's Hollywood's worst-kept secret already.