Oscars Voter Admits Lying About Best Picture Viewing — Are the New Rules Already Failing?

Oscars voting just wrapped — and an anonymous Academy member admits she skipped a Best Picture contender and still checked the new watch-to-vote box. Her eyebrow-raising confession spills how she made her pick anyway, stoking fresh questions about the integrity of the race.

Oscar voting just closed, and already we have a voter saying the quiet part out loud. One anonymous Academy member admitted she ranked a Best Picture nominee dead last without actually watching it. Bold move, especially after the Academy tightened the rules to stop exactly this.

The confession

The voter, a woman from the Academy’s documentary branch (which clocks in at 719 members), walked through parts of her ballot for this year’s ceremony on March 15, 2026. The headline-grabber: she parked Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein at the bottom of her Best Picture ranking because she didn’t see it, then certified that she had.

"I put Frankenstein at number 10 because I haven’t seen it, which is unfair, but I ran out of time and decided to check the box indicating that I had so that I could support other films."

About those 'watch everything' rules

Last year, the Academy made a straightforward change: if you want to vote in the final round in a category, you have to watch all the nominees in that category. The idea was to make the ballot fairer and the results harder to game. In practice? There’s no airtight way to police 9,000-ish people, and this voter just said the quiet part into a recorder.

What she actually watched (or didn’t)

She also bailed early on another Best Picture contender, F1.

"F1 was not for me — I watched about 45 minutes of it, and I didn’t need to watch more."

• Best Picture: ranked Frankenstein at #10 without seeing it
• Best Picture: sampled about 45 minutes of F1
• Best Picture: put Sentimental Value at #1
• Best Director: voted for Ryan Coogler for Sinner

Why this will stir things up

The Academy can’t realistically vet every single ballot, but hearing a member casually admit to checking the attestation box anyway is... not the optics they were going for. Add in what looks like a tight race across several categories, and you can see the backlash brewing if more voters quietly followed the same playbook.