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2027 Oscars: Date, Host, Nomination Day and the New Rules

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The 99th Academy Awards, the 2027 Oscars, will be held on Sunday, March 14, 2027, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and broadcast live on ABC. Nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 21, 2027, and Conan O’Brien returns as host for a third straight year.

The short version: Any feature with a qualifying theatrical release during calendar 2026 can compete. The rulebook for this cycle bars AI-generated performances from the acting categories, lets a single actor collect more than one nomination in the same category, and opens a second route into International Feature through six festivals. Everything below is current as of October 11, with the 2026 eligibility year still open; the Academy itself warns that all its dates are subject to change.

When are the 2027 Oscars?

The Academy and ABC announced the date in April: Sunday, March 14, 2027, live at 7 p.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. Pacific from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, and carried in more than 200 territories. TheWrap pointed out that this lands just one day earlier on the calendar than the 98th ceremony, which took place on March 15, so anyone hoping for a shorter awards season did not get one.

The same announcement set the 100th Oscars for Sunday, March 5, 2028. The voting calendar for the 2027 show runs as follows, taken from the Academy and ABC release.

Date Step
January 1, 2026 Eligibility period opens
November 12, 2026 Final submission deadline: general entry categories, Animated Feature, Best Picture, RAISE form
November 15, 2026 Governors Awards (honorary Oscars)
December 7–11, 2026 Preliminary voting
December 15, 2026 Shortlists announced
December 31, 2026 Eligibility period closes
January 11–15, 2027 Nominations voting
January 21, 2027 Nominations announced
February 16, 2027 Nominees luncheon
February 25 to March 4, 2027 Final voting
March 14, 2027 99th Oscars, live on ABC

The two dates most viewers care about are January 21, when the nominees are read out, and March 14, the show itself. Final voting closes at 5 p.m. Pacific on March 4, ten days before the ceremony. If the guild awards, critics’ prizes and precursors that fill those weeks are a blur, our guide to how awards season works, from the guilds to the Oscars lays out the sequence.

Which films are eligible?

The eligibility window for the 99th Oscars is the calendar year: it opened on January 1, 2026 and closes on December 31, 2026. NPR’s summary of the rules puts it plainly: they cover “films released in 2026.” The test is a qualifying theatrical run inside that window, so a film that opens in late December 2026 competes this season, while one that slips to January waits for the 100th Oscars.

Paperwork has its own deadline. The final submission date for the general entry categories, Animated Feature Film, Best Picture and the RAISE form (the Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry) is November 12, 2026. The Daily Star’s rundown of the rules notes that the International Feature Film deadline was September 30, so that field is already set.

Who is hosting, and who is producing?

Academy leaders confirmed on May 12, 2026 that Conan O’Brien will host again, The Associated Press reported, which makes the 2027 show his third in a row. Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan return as executive producers. In his monologue at the 98th ceremony, O’Brien said he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards … Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.” The joke now reads as a preview of one of this cycle’s rule changes.

On ratings, AP reported that O’Brien’s first show drew a post-pandemic high of 19.7 million viewers, the year Anora swept, and that viewership dipped for the 98th ceremony, when One Battle After Another was named best picture.

The rule changes for the 2027 Oscars

NPR reported the new rulebook on May 2, 2026. In a statement to NPR, the Academy said the changes respond to the global filmmaking community and lower barriers to entry, and that its standards have always moved with new technology, from sound and color to CGI, adding that AI is no different. These are the changes that matter most to viewers.

Acting must be human. Only roles “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” qualify for the acting awards, and the performance must be credited in the film’s legal billing. The Daily Star tied the timing to the debate over Val Kilmer’s likeness being used in the film As Deep as the Grave.

Screenplays must be “human-authored.” The Academy also kept the right to look into how generative AI was used in any submission, and it may ask filmmakers to explain how such tools were used and how much human creative input went into the work.

One actor, several nominations. Under the old rules an actor could hold only one nomination per category; if two performances both polled well, only the stronger one advanced. Now any performance that finishes in the top five gets in. NPR pointed to Anne Hathaway, who has five major films scheduled for 2026, as the theoretical extreme. Deadline’s Pete Hammond, quoted by NPR, asked whether someone might “swallow up three of the five nominations” and answered himself: “Probably won’t happen, but it’s now possible.”

International Feature has a second door. Countries still pick official submissions, but a non-English-language film can now also qualify by winning a named top prize at one of six festivals: the Golden Bear at Berlin, Busan’s Best Film Award, the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Toronto’s Platform Award, or Venice’s Golden Lion. A single country can now place two or more films on the shortlist. The informal name, according to The Daily Star, is the “Anatomy of a Fall rule”: Justine Triet’s film won the Palme d’Or in 2023, France submitted The Taste of Things instead, and Anatomy of a Fall still earned five nominations through other categories and won Original Screenplay. Two 2026 festival winners benefit straight away: İlker Çatak’s Yellow Letters, which took Berlin’s Golden Bear and is in Turkish, and Visar Morina’s Shame and Money, the Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize winner.

Smaller craft changes. Casting can now hand out up to three statuettes instead of two. The cinematography branch will produce a fixed shortlist of 20 films in preliminary voting, where the range used to float between 10 and 20 titles. Members who want a final-round vote in Visual Effects must first sit through the short before-and-after reels shown at that branch’s bake-off. Those bake-off sessions, which also cover casting, sound, and makeup and hairstyling, run January 8–10, 2027.

What happens between now and nomination day

As of mid-October, the International Feature field is closed and the main submission deadline is a month away. Studios have until November 12, 2026 to lodge their general-category and Best Picture entries. Three days later, on November 15, the Academy hands out its honorary Oscars at the 17th Governors Awards: Honorary Awards go to Glenn Close, Floyd Norman and Ridley Scott, and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, per the honorees list published in June.

Shortlists in the categories that use them follow on December 15, 2026, after a preliminary vote from December 7 to 11. The eligibility window shuts at the end of December, and nominations voting runs from January 11 to 15. If you track the race by critical reception, our table of Rotten Tomatoes scores for every Best Picture winner is a useful reminder of how loosely reviews and Oscar wins line up.

After 2027: the last ABC years and the move to YouTube

The 2027 show is the second-to-last Oscars on broadcast television and the second-to-last at the Hollywood venue, AP noted. TheWrap spelled out what ends with the 100th ceremony in 2028: it will be the final Oscars on ABC, which has aired the show since 1976, and the final one at the Dolby, the home of the ceremony every year since 2002 apart from the pandemic-hit 2021 show. From the 101st Academy Awards, in 2029, YouTube becomes the broadcaster and the ceremony moves downtown to the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live, which TheWrap says will carry a different name by then.

Frequently Asked Questions

When are the 2027 Oscars?

Sunday, March 14, 2027, live from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood at 7 p.m. Eastern and 4 p.m. Pacific on ABC. The Academy says all dates are subject to change.

When are the 2027 Oscar nominations announced?

Thursday, January 21, 2027. Nomination voting runs from January 11 to January 15, 2027, and the nominees luncheon follows on February 16, 2027.

Who is hosting the 2027 Oscars?

Conan O’Brien, for the third year in a row. Academy leaders confirmed it on May 12, 2026, with Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan returning as executive producers.

What movies are eligible for the 99th Academy Awards?

Feature films with a qualifying theatrical release between January 1, 2026 and December 31, 2026. The final submission deadline for Best Picture and the general entry categories is November 12, 2026.

Can an AI actor be nominated for an Oscar?

No. Under the rules for the 99th Oscars, acting awards are limited to credited roles demonstrably performed by humans with their consent, and screenplays must be human-authored to qualify for the writing awards.

Sources

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