Anonymous Oscar ballots unmask the Academy

Voting closed for the 2023 Academy Awards earlier this week, and now ahead of the ceremony on Sunday, March 12, entertainment media can indulge in one of its favorite pastimes: the anonymous Oscars ballot. This time-honored tradition was brought back by several outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and GoldDerby.

The obvious usefulness of the anonymous ballot is that it elucidates the reasoning behind Academy members’ picks. For instance, the member of the short films and feature animation branch identifies both Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett as “overdue” for a win in his ballot for THR. Similarly, the costume designer who shared their ballot with IndieWire favored Women Talking “because it has less of a chance than TÁR” and the costumes for Everything Everywhere All At Once over Black Panther: Wakanda Forever because “Ruth Carter is a genius, but she’s already won. I’d like somebody else to have a go.”

But the real appeal of the anonymous ballot is the shit-talking that goes on behind the scenes, and there is no bigger shit-talker on the anonymous ballot scene this year than “The Actor” from Entertainment Weekly’s voter roundtable. A male performer from “critically heralded prestige dramas, biting mainstream thrillers, and on Emmy-winning TV shows,” this voter uses his anonymity to decry “wokeness” and scold the team behind The Woman King, a film he didn’t see: “Viola Davis and the lady director need to sit down, shut up, and relax. You didn’t get a nomination—a lot of movies don’t get nominations.”

Not all the revelations from these anonymous ballots are so incendiary (“When you dig a little deeper, sometimes the stories aren’t necessarily the narratives you see at every single awards show,” says The Marketer, who claims “a lot of people” they talked to at Academy screenings “didn’t care for” TÁR). But it’s the undercurrent of racism in The Actor’s remarks that seem most revealing about the Academy. As much as the institution has paid lip service to diversifying itself in the past few years, the nominations still skew largely white and male, with no Black artists in major categories like Lead Actor/Actress, Directing, Cinematography, etc. If the nominations reflect the perspective of the institution, the institution is given an (anonymous) voice in The Actor. “The Academy has bent over backwards to be inclusive,” he complains. “Last year, there were more Black people presenting.”

Racial diversity is not the only issue at hand. “I felt like people went out of their way to exclude [women], because inclusion is hard, and they’re tired,” The Director observes to EW about the Best Director category. “The Academy still has a lot of work to do with its membership to make it more representative…. it did feel purposely exclusionary.” This, perhaps, gets at the crux of the Academy’s problem. It’s much easier for the producers of a single ceremony to get more Black presenters on the stage than to actually do the difficult work of uprooting the racism and misogyny buried within the institution. Could The Actor’s opinions on the subject of diversity really be pervasive amidst Hollywood’s old guard? The comments may be anonymous, but they nevertheless reveal something ugly about the Academy.