How Oscar and Grammy Winners Are Actually Chosen
Neither award is decided quite the way most people assume. One protects its results through extraordinary secrecy. The other rebuilt part of its nomination system after a public trust crisis.
On Oscar night, the identities of the winners are among the most closely guarded secrets in entertainment.
For the final results, two PwC partners have traditionally been the only people who know the complete list before the envelopes are opened. They memorize the winners, prepare the sealed envelopes, and deliver them to the ceremony. The numbers behind the results aren't publicly released.
The Grammys took a very different route.
After years of criticism over parts of its nomination system and a particularly public controversy in 2021, the Recording Academy eliminated its Nominations Review Committees for general and genre fields. From the 2022 awards onward, nominations in those fields were returned to majority voting by the Academy's voting members.
Two of the world's most recognizable cultural awards.
Two very different answers to the same question:
How do you make people trust the result?
The Academy's Deliberate Blackout
The Oscars aren't decided by one giant popularity poll.
The Academy currently has more than 11,000 members organized across 19 branches, representing areas such as acting, directing, editing, cinematography, sound, visual effects and writing.
When nominations are decided, members of each branch generally vote within their own craft.
Actors nominate actors.
Directors nominate directors.
Editors nominate editors.
And so on.
The Academy's 2026 nominations announcement confirms this branch-based structure, while also noting that all active members are eligible to select the Best Picture nominees.
Best Picture is where things get particularly interesting.
Instead of simply asking voters to choose one favorite, the Academy uses a preferential voting system for the final Best Picture ballot.
Voters rank the nominated films.
If one film receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, it wins.
If nobody reaches that threshold, the film with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Those ballots are then redistributed according to the voters' next preferences.
The process continues until one film reaches a majority.
In other words, winning Best Picture isn't simply about being the film that gets the most first-choice votes.
It's about being the film that can build the broadest support as the count progresses.
Did You Know?
The Academy has used preferential voting for Best Picture for more than a century, although the details and terminology of the system have changed over time. The Academy's own historical records describe the system as one that asks voters to rank their preferences rather than simply mark a single choice.
The Secret Inside the Envelope
Now comes the part that sounds almost like a spy movie.
PwC has handled the Oscars' ballot tabulation for decades.
For the final results, the firm's balloting partners oversee the count and recount. Historically, the winners are committed to memory rather than being kept as one easily accessible master list.
Two identical sets of envelopes are prepared for the ceremony.
The partners then take responsibility for getting those results to the stage.
The extraordinary secrecy isn't accidental.
It's the system.
Recent reporting on the 2026 Oscars confirms that PwC continues to tabulate the votes and that the two partners overseeing the process know the winners before the ceremony.
And there's another unusual feature:
The Academy doesn't publish the final vote totals.
We know who won.
We don't normally know how narrowly they won.
We don't know who came second.
We don't get to see a table showing that a film lost by 17 votes.
That information simply isn't part of the public result.
Why Hide the Numbers?
At first, this seems strange.
Wouldn't publishing the numbers make the Oscars more transparent?
Maybe.
But there is another way to think about it.
Imagine the Academy announced:
Film A — 51.2%
Film B — 48.8%
Suddenly, every Oscar discussion becomes a debate about the margin.
“It almost won.”
“The Academy really preferred the other film.”
“Only 2.4% separated them.”
A close race could remain part of a film's cultural reputation forever.
By keeping the final numbers private, the Academy creates a much simpler public reality:
One film won.
The legitimacy of the result therefore depends less on auditing the margin and more on trusting the system that produced it.
That's a deliberate institutional choice.
Remember the 2017 Envelope Disaster?
There's an important distinction here.
The famous 2017 Oscar mistake wasn't caused by someone leaking or changing the vote.
La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture before the correct winner, Moonlight, was revealed.
The problem was an incorrect envelope handoff.
PwC accepted responsibility for the error, and the Academy introduced additional safeguards afterward. PwC nevertheless remained the Oscar ballot tabulator.
In other words:
The secrecy system didn't fail. The handoff did.
And that distinction matters because it shows just how much of the Oscar process is built around controlling the final moment.
Then the Grammys Took a Different Route
The Recording Academy faced a very different problem.
For years, Grammy nominations in many fields involved Nominations Review Committees, small groups of music professionals who could review and determine the final nominee lists after an earlier voting stage.
The system was designed partly as a quality-control mechanism.
But it also created an obvious question:
Who exactly is making the final decision?
In 2021, that question became impossible to ignore.
The Weeknd's After Hours was one of the year's biggest commercial successes, yet it received no Grammy nominations. The artist publicly called the process “corrupt.”
The Recording Academy responded with a major structural change.
In April 2021, its Board of Trustees approved the elimination of Nominations Review Committees in the General and Genre Fields. Beginning with the 2022 Grammys, nominations in those fields were to be determined by majority, peer-to-peer voting among Recording Academy voting members.
The institution wasn't simply defending the old system.
It changed the system.
Why That Change Mattered
The difference is subtle but important.
The old model effectively said:
Thousands of members vote → a smaller expert group reviews → nominees emerge.
The revised model for the General and Genre Fields moved closer to:
Voting members vote → nominees emerge.
That doesn't automatically make the result better.
It simply changes where the decision-making power sits.
Instead of asking the public to trust a relatively small, largely invisible group of reviewers, the Recording Academy put more of the nomination decision directly in the hands of its voting membership.
Today, the Recording Academy describes the Grammys as a peer-voted award. Its current FAQ states that the award is voted on by voting members who include music creators such as artists, producers, songwriters and engineers.
There is an important nuance, though.
The review committees weren't simply replaced everywhere by one universal voting rule. Selected Craft Categories still use specialized Craft Committees, while General and Genre Fields follow the broader member-voting model.
That's a much more accurate picture of how the Grammys work today.
The Grammys don't treat their rulebook as permanent.
The Recording Academy reviews proposed changes every year, and the rules continue to evolve as the music industry changes.
For the 2027 Grammys, the Academy introduced five new categories, including Best Asian Pop Music Performance and Best Latin Song. It also introduced Ballot Plus, an optional voting route allowing qualified members with expertise across multiple genres to vote in additional peer-related categories.
So the Grammy system isn't simply “fixed.”
It's being redesigned continuously.
Two Theories of Trust
And this is where the story becomes bigger than awards shows.
The Oscars and Grammys are solving essentially the same institutional problem:
How do you produce a winner that people will accept as legitimate?
But their answers are almost opposite.
The Oscars say:
Trust the expertise. Protect the process. Keep the final numbers private.
The Academy organizes voters into professional branches, uses specialized knowledge in nominations, employs an independent accounting firm, and protects the final results with extraordinary secrecy.
The Grammys say:
Put more of the decision directly in the hands of the voting membership.
After eliminating Nominations Review Committees in General and Genre Fields, the Recording Academy shifted nominations in those fields back to member voting.
Neither approach guarantees that everyone will agree with the winner.
That's not really the point.
The point is to make the process credible enough that people accept the outcome even when their favorite loses.
The Interesting Part Is What Happens Next
Both institutions continue to adjust their machinery.
The Academy has 19 branches and continues to change its structure as the film industry evolves.
The Recording Academy updates categories, eligibility rules and voting procedures every year. Its 2027 changes include new categories and a new voting option.
That tells us something important.
There isn't one perfect way to design a prestigious award.
There is only a series of choices about:
Who gets to decide?
How are decisions counted?
Who can influence the process?
And how much should the public be allowed to see?
Knowlegic Perspective
The Oscars and Grammys aren't just award shows.
They're examples of institutional design.
The Oscars have built legitimacy around expertise, professional branches and extreme confidentiality.
The Grammys have moved toward broader member participation in major nomination fields after deciding that a layer of private review had become difficult to defend.
One system says:
Trust the process because the process is protected.
The other increasingly says:
Trust the process because more of the people inside it get a direct vote.
Neither is obviously perfect.
And that's precisely what makes them interesting.
The same principle appears far beyond entertainment.
Universities decide who gets admitted.
Companies decide who gets promoted.
Governments decide who gets selected for public roles.
Juries decide verdicts.
Organizations decide rankings and awards.
In all of these situations, we tend to focus on the decision.
But often, the more revealing question is:
Who was allowed to make it and how?
The mechanics of a decision can shape how legitimate that decision feels.
Because when an institution gives something away that thousands of people want an Oscar, a Grammy, a place at a university, a promotion, a ranking the hardest part isn't necessarily choosing a winner.
It's convincing everyone else that the choice was worth trusting.
And sometimes, the rules behind the decision tell us more about an institution than the winner ever could.
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