Every Time The Oscars Ended In A Tie

If you tune into award shows often enough, the language surrounding them begins to sound like something out of a football game. Actors campaign throughout the “season,” often scoring wins in the lead-up to the Oscars that put them in a better or worse position for the big trophy. Commentators dissect performances and explain the odds of each participant. There are dark horses, contenders, fan favorites, and comeback stories. When the night of the Academy Awards finally arrives, that, too, feels like a sort of sport. You can win or lose narrowly (often thanks to a split vote), or in a clear landslide — or, rarest of all, you can tie.

There have only been six ties in Oscar history, though you’d be forgiven for swearing there were more of them. Moments like the “Moonlight” and “La La Land” Best Picture screw-up of 2016, or years in which several titles each score a major win (like in 2019, when the four major acting trophies went to four different movies) can easily be misremembered as ties. In reality, though, Oscar ties are exceedingly rare thanks in part to the huge membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. According to the Oscars’ official website, 10,500 film industry folks have Academy membership, and they’re all eligible to vote for the final round of the Oscars. 

In the early days of Hollywood, though, that number was much smaller, making ties a bit more likely. Here are the six Oscar races that have ended in a draw over the past 96 years.

According to the Academy, the first ever Oscars tie took place at the show’s 5th ceremony, which highlighted a turning point in the film industry. The night’s winners included the first Oscar-winning color film (“Flowers and Trees”) and the first short films ever recognized in their own category. Walt Disney also made a special short for the occasion, and “Parade of the Award Nominees” marked the first time Mickey Mouse ever showed up on screen in color (with green pants!), per D23.

It was also the first time the Academy was caught off guard by an unexpected twist unfolding in real time. When it came time to take home the award for Best Actor, both Fredrich March and Wallace Beery were honored. The former played Dr. Jekyll and his sinister counterpart Mr. Hyde in Paramount’s pre-Code adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famed horror story. Beery, meanwhile, led the cast of “The Champ,” a movie about an alcoholic boxer from MGM.

The category was slim that year, with only one other nominated actor (Alfred Lunt for “The Guardsman”). Both Beery and March were awarded top prize, though The Wrap notes that it was initially handed out to March alone. By the end of the night, someone had noticed that Beery was a winner as well; he’d been just one vote behind March, and at that time, ties reportedly allowed for a margin of 3 votes. Per Wiley Mason and Damien Bona’s book “Inside Oscar,” Academy president Conrad Nagel called Beery up to the stage, presented him with a statuette, and announced that he had tied with March for the prize — to raucous applause. The rules about ties changed in the future to require an exact match of vote totals, no doubt turning several potential ties into near-misses for unlucky nominees who lost by just one or two votes.

The second Oscars tie came over a decade after the first, just a handful of years after documentary short films started to be recognized by the Academy. This was another instance of a relatively small field of nominees, with just four shorts: the French Revolution explainer “1848”; the Italian boys’ home spotlight “A Chance To Live”; the animated public health hypothetical “So Much For So Little”; and “The Rising Tide,” a film about the struggles of Maritime region fisherman in Canada. Two movies about the welfare of children, James L. Schute’s “A Chance to Live” and Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng’s “So Much For So Little,” ultimately tied for top prize in the short doc section.

While “A Chance to Live” doesn’t get referenced much these days, “So Much For So Little” remains an enduring work thanks to its frank and touching explanation of the importance of public health services in the development of the next generation of children. The short, which is viewable in the public domain, is a Warner Bros. production that’s sometimes been associated with Looney Tunes, but it was also commissioned by the U.S. Public Health Service. The movie is an especially effective and empathetic slice of propaganda, which highlights how public services are working to reduce infant and childhood mortality through public sanitation measures, vaccinations, childhood exams, hot school lunches, disability services, and more.

In 1949, the Best Pictures slate was still entirely composed of black and white films. Hollywood still hadn’t fully switched to color, and yet they’d already cracked an important message about the country’s future that’s still somehow in dispute in 2024.

When people talk about Oscar ties, they’re usually talking about the 1968 Best Actress race. The classic Academy Awards moment featured two women who embodied the old and the new in Hollywood, who instead of being pitted against one another were asked to share the glory as co-winners. This was the year that Katharine Hepburn broke a record by winning her third Oscar as a leading lady (she’d later break it again with “On Golden Pond”), and it was also the year that Barbara Streisand won an Oscar for her first-ever feature film role.

Hepburn won for “The Lion in Winter,” a historical drama in which she played Eleanor of Aquitaine, the estranged wife of Henry the II (Peter O’Toole). Streisand won for “Funny Girl,” the musical comedy drama about the life of 1930s star Fanny Brice. Of the two, only Streisand attended the ceremony, and according to Anne Edwards’ book “Streisand: A Biography,” she “rose briskly from her seat, ran up the aisle and the steps to the wide stage…and stood beaming beside [presenter Ingrid] Bergman.” Per The Wrap, the person who handed Bergman the envelope warned her: “make sure you read everything.” Bergman announced Hepburn’s name first, then waited for a pause in the applause to declare Streisand an additional winner.

Streisand famously declared “Hello, gorgeous!” when she got to the podium, and said she was “honored to be in such magnificent company as Katharine Hepburn.” Weirdly, Streisand’s win caused a stir when people noticed that she’d been admitted to the Academy before “Funny Girl” even came out, and presumably could’ve cast the tie-making vote for herself (per The Hollywood Reporter). Then-Academy president Gregory Peck “categorically rejected any possible implication that Miss Streisand might have been rushed into membership as a result of studio politics or pressure,” and noted the Streisand was an established star on stage by the time she gained Academy membership. Plus, who knows if she even voted for herself?

It would be two decades before Oscars audiences witnessed another tie, and this time around, it was for a less flashy category: best feature-length documentary. Unsurprisingly, the Academy avoided recognizing the timely, internationally-made documentary nominees, which included a movie filmed in secret in South Africa called “Witness to Apartheid” and an Australian exploration of the Augusto Pinochet regime titled “Chile: When Will It End?” A movie about Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Yiddish-language writer who left Poland for the U.S. ahead of the Nazi invasion, was also nominated.

Instead, the Academy awarded two separate documentaries that both called to mind the turbulent decade of Ronald Reagan’s presidential reign. Oprah Winfrey presented the dual awards to the makers of “Down and Out in America,” an HBO doc about the human cost of Reaganomics, and “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got,” a spotlight on the life of a famed jazz clarinetist who epitomized the big band era of American music. Shaw’s life story might not initially seem political, but he testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold War, and even rubbed elbows with Reagan when the two belonged to a Hollywood committee suspected of being a front for a Communist organization in the 1940s (per WSWS).

This tie is memorable in part because both documentaries were directed by women. When the tie was announced, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” filmmaker Brigitte Berman took to the podium first, then “Down and Out in America” director Lee Grant garnered cheers by declaring, “This is for the people who are still down and out in America!” The documentaries nominated at the 59th Academy Awards also have random connections to both of the winners of 1968’s tie: Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote the short story on which Barbara Streisand’s “Yentl” is based, while Katharine Hepburn was reportedly part of the maybe-Communist Hollywood committee that landed Artie Shaw in hot water during the Red Scare.

Skip forward a few years from the Best Documentary Short double dip, and the Oscars’ fifth-ever tie appears. In 1994, two short films had an exact tie, resulting in a trophy for both future “Doctor Who” star Peter Capaldi and Peggy Rajski, who would go on to co-found the groundbreaking help hotline for LGBTQ+ young people, the Trevor Project. Believe it or not, the enduring organization was actually started as a direct result of the movie that tied in the Best Live Action Short Film category in 1994 – a vital 23-minute-long story called “Trevor.”

The eponymous character in “Trevor” is a 13-year-old boy (Brett Barsky) who is subject to bullying from friends and family for his perceived queerness. When a diary entry he wrote about a male classmate is discovered, the boy begins to feel like he has nothing left to live for. According to The Queer Review, director Rajski and writer Celeste Lecesne hoped to provide viewers with a resource in case the movie –– which debuted on HBO — stirred up any negative feelings and left them in need of support. When they found out no such hotline existed, they decided to make one. Three decades later, the Trevor Project still helps hundreds of thousands of people per year, with their 2023 annual report indicating that over 502,000 people in crisis contacted them that year alone.

The second short film winner at the 67th Oscars couldn’t be more different from “Trevor.” Capaldi wrote and directed the 23-minute short, titled “Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life,” and it’s as weird as it sounds. By mixing the format of the Frank Capra Christmas classic with the absurd satire of Czech writer Kafka, “Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life” somehow struck gold. It won not just an Oscar, but also two BAFTAs, and future Oscar season favorite Richard E. Grant starred as Kafka on the precipice of penning one of his greatest works.

The only Oscars tie this side of the 21st century came in 2013, a strange Oscars year that saw movies like “Les Miserables,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” and “Argo” find their way into the Best Picture race (the latter ultimately won). The tie in question came courtesy of a category that doesn’t actually exist anymore: Best Sound Editing. The recognition of one of the most underrecognized yet vital parts of any film was collapsed into a single category alongside Best Sound Mixing beginning in 2021, but in the 2010s, the two were still recognized as distinctive categories. The Sound Mixing award in 2013 (somehow) went to Tom Hooper’s “Les Mis” adaptation, while the Sound Editing award was split between “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Skyfall.”

Both films were more than deserving of the honor. Sam Mendes’ uncharacteristically artsy Bond film “Skyfall” juggled major set pieces with quieter moments and kept audiences precisely tuned in to every moment thanks to gorgeous cinematography, layered performances, and great sound design. Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” an ethically questionable thriller about the killing of Osama bin Laden, managed to evoke the organized chaos of a secret operation while maintaining a wire-taut sense of tension. Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers took home the trophy for “Skyfall,” while Paul N. J. Ottosson was awarded for “Zero Dark Thirty.”

At the time, the Academy had over 6000 members (according to Variety), making any sort of tie pretty remarkable. In the years that followed, the group purposely expanded and diversified its membership, and its ranks have swelled by several thousand. It may be a while before we see another tie at the Oscars, but in keeping with the tradition of the overlong award telecast, we’ll just have to hope it’ll be worth the wait.