AMPAS To Expand Festival Qualifier List For International Oscar

Six festivals currently feed the International Oscar category on their own, and AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer says that number will grow. He confirmed the expansion in an interview with Deadline at the Tokyo Film Festival, where he appeared alongside Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor and Chief Membership, Impact and Industry Officer Meredith Shea.

The three Academy executives are taking part in a series of public talks titled Academy in Tokyo, one of the headline events at this year's festival. Kramer will also receive an honorary leadership award there. The Tokyo Film Festival runs until November 4.

How does the current rule work?

Under rules introduced in May, films that win the top award at six festivals — Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto and Venice — qualify automatically for the International Film Oscar category. A winner at any of those festivals can enter the race alongside films selected by a country's official submission committee.

The restriction to six events was deliberate. "We started with six festivals because we wanted to make sure there were juried awards, which not every festival has," Kramer said. The juried-award requirement functions as a quality gate: only festivals with juries awarding a top prize can trigger automatic qualification.

Takeaway: the rule rewards jury verdicts, not audience prizes, and that constraint shaped the initial list.

What does the expansion change in the race?

"Our plan is to expand the number of festivals," Kramer told Deadline when asked about the list of feeders for the category. He said AMPAS remains in constant conversation with film festivals across the globe.

"We want to make sure there is proper global representation in the number of festivals we're working with for this category," he said. "It's all about inviting more films into the conversation."

Kramer framed the May rule as one step in a sequence of changes designed to approach the category in a "more holistic way" and globalize the Academy's efforts. The sequence started earlier.

"A few years ago, the first thing we did was create a rule allowing refugee filmmakers who are no longer in their home country to have their films submitted by a host-country committee," Kramer said. "That was the first step in creating a broader aperture for who can participate in the category. The next step was to consider how we could select films beyond committee-selected submissions and ensure greater global representation."

The mechanism matters for national committees. Every additional qualifying festival creates a second route into the race for films that a country's committee might otherwise overlook.

Takeaway: the expansion shifts part of the selection power from national committees to festival juries.

Why the push toward international?

Kramer said 25% of the Academy's membership now resides outside the United States, a figure he sees as a natural reflection of shifts in film production and consumption.

"I think the lines between U.S. and non-U.S. cinema, first-run and classic films, animation, and documentaries have become much less distinct," he said. "A lot of this has to do with the pandemic, when people at home watched films they normally wouldn't have watched — young people especially. It changed the nature of our industry."

Takeaway: the membership base now skews a quarter international, and the rules are catching up to it.

Where does YouTube fit?

Kramer said the Academy's global makeup is one of the main factors that makes YouTube the right broadcast home for the Oscars. YouTube won the rights to host the Academy Awards starting in 2029, as announced in December 2025. The Google-owned service outbid other offers, including one from ABC, the Oscars' home since 1976. Disney's deal runs through 2028. YouTube's first show will be the 101st Oscars ceremony, and its deal runs through 2033.

"The beauty of the YouTube deal is that everyone will see the same show," Kramer said. "We'll have control over fan engagement and reach 2.5 billion people around the world at the same time, on the same night, in more than 30 languages. It also gives us more quality control over what our fans see and experience. That's really important."

The deal sits within a broader shift of live events to streaming platforms. Netflix now carries the SAG Awards, renamed The Actor Awards, and Prime Video will broadcast the Emmys from 2027. The alliance between big tech and the film world has not been friction-free; Amazon's mishandling of Luca Guadagnino's Artificial stands as the cautionary case.

Asked whether the Academy has planned for similar scenarios, Kramer answered directly: "There's no censorship allowed at the Academy, at the Oscars, or on our broadcast. We've been very clear about that, and Google and YouTube completely understand."

One more qualifying festival list, one broadcast deal through 2033: the Academy is wiring international reach into both ends of the Oscar pipeline.