Academy tightens AI rules, expands international film eligibility for 99th Oscars

Hollywood’s awards body tightened its guardrails around artificial intelligence on Friday, drawing a sharper boundary between machine-assisted filmmaking and the human labor that still decides Oscar eligibility. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that for the 99th Oscars, set for Sunday, March 14, 2027, screenplays in the writing categories must be human-authored, while acting nominees must be credited in a film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent. Generative AI and other digital tools, the Academy said, will neither help nor hurt a film on their own.

The message was clear: the Academy is not banning AI, but it is pushing the burden back onto filmmakers to prove where human creativity begins and ends. Lynette Howell Taylor put the line bluntly: “Humans have to be at the center of the creative process,” while the Academy also signaled that branches can ask teams for more information about AI use and authorship. That leaves a narrow opening for productions that use digital tools in support roles, but it also gives voters and branch committees more authority to scrutinize whether a project’s creative achievement still rests on human decision-making.

The new rules also alter acting eligibility in a way that could reshape awards strategy. Performers can now be nominated for multiple performances in the same acting category in one year if both land among the top five vote-getters, ending a previous limitation that narrowed recognition to only the top performance. In the Casting category, the number of statuettes rises from two to three, while Cinematography will now produce a 20-film shortlist in the preliminary round. For Visual Effects, all Academy members must watch the three-minute before-and-after reels from the bake-off before voting in the final round.

The biggest structural overhaul came in International Feature Film, where filmmakers now have two submission paths. A film can come through an Academy-approved country or region selection committee, or it can qualify through a prize at one of six listed festivals: Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto or Venice. The nominee will be credited as the film rather than the country or region, the director will accept the award on behalf of the creative team, and the director’s name will appear on the statuette plaque. The change answers long-running criticism of the old one-country, one-film model, which left France’s 2023 Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall outside the race and forced Iranian films such as The Seed of the Sacred Fig and It Was Just an Accident to reach the category through European co-production routes.

The new rules land as the industry keeps wrestling with digital replicas, synthetic performers and the aftershocks of the 2023 strikes. For studios and awards campaigns, the practical lesson is straightforward: AI may remain in the toolbox, but the Academy is putting human authorship back at the center of the chase for Oscar gold.