The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced a sweeping set of new eligibility rules for the 99th Academy Awards, scheduled for March 14, 2027, including a formal ban on artificial intelligence in the acting and writing categories, and the most significant structural change to acting nominations in the award’s nearly 100-year history.
The centerpiece of the new AI policy states that only performances “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” will be eligible for acting nominations. The Academy has also ruled that to qualify for a screenwriting award, a script must be “human-authored,” meaning that screenplays substantially generated by artificial intelligence tools are explicitly disqualified. The Academy further reserved the right to request documentation from filmmakers regarding AI usage and evidence of human authorship where questions arise.
The new acting nominations rule is equally historic in scope. Under previous Academy rules — in place since the 17th Academy Awards in 1945 — if a single performer had two performances that both qualified among the top five vote-getters in a category, only the higher-ranked performance could be nominated. The lower-ranked performance would be removed from contention entirely. That restriction has now been eliminated. Going forward, an actor may receive multiple nominations within the same category in a single year if their performances each rank in the top five votes. This change aligns the acting races with all other Academy Award categories, where nominees have always been able to compete against themselves.
The International Feature Film category has also been fundamentally reformed. Previously, each eligible country could submit only one film per year, with the official national selection committee determining which film represented the country. Under the new rules, films may qualify for the category in two ways: either via the traditional national selection process, or by winning a top prize at one of six recognized international film festivals — Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, or Venice. Additionally, if a festival-qualified film wins the category, the Oscar statuette will be presented to the film itself and its director, rather than to the submitting country. The Academy also confirmed that the Casting category will increase the maximum number of statuettes awarded from two to three.
The rules apply to all films submitted for the 99th Oscars. Key submission deadlines include August 13, 2026, for short film and documentary categories, and September 17, 2026, for general entry categories including Best Picture. The 99th Academy Awards ceremony will be held at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, airing live at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and in more than 200 territories worldwide.
