Numlock Sunday: Who really votes on the Oscars?

Something fun today! I’m cross-posting an edition from Numlock Awards, our spinoff newsletter about Oscar season.

On Friday, the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finished their nominating ballots for the Oscars. The results of those nominations will be announced on this coming Thursday.

The role of the Academy in terms of the Oscars has historically been played down; they are invariably thanked in awards speeches, but the organization is pretty coy about the reality that this thing is just an election. An election by definition needs an electorate, and so if we want to see what’s been happening with the Oscars, we need to trace what’s been happening with the electorate.

Why the Academy changed, and how that made it hard to predict the Oscars

The biggest story of the past several decades of the Academy was the large membership expansion that the organization underwent from 2016 to 2020.

The electorate mostly evolves by invitation. For a few years the management was shuf…