LOS ANGELES — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced multiple major rule changes for the Oscars on Friday, including new requirements that acting performances and screenplays be the work of humans and an expansion of nomination allowances across several categories. The Academy stated that AI tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination, and said each branch will judge achievements based on the degree of human creative authorship.

Under the new rules, only performances demonstrably performed by humans with their consent are eligible for acting Oscars, and only screenplays authored by humans are eligible for writing awards. The Academy called the human authorship requirement for acting and writing a "substantive" change to the rules. The Academy retained the right to request additional information about a film's use of artificial intelligence and did not ban the use of AI tools in other filmmaking areas. The policy addresses eligibility questions raised by the posthumous completion of a performance by Val Kilmer using AI after his death in 2025.

"Humans have to be at the center of the creative process," academy president Lynette Howell Taylor said. Film academy CEO Bill Kramer said the Academy would evaluate AI use going forward on a case-by-case basis. "We will review that on a case-by-case basis. We, like everybody in our industry and world, we will be assessing this every year," Kramer said.

Kramer also described the package of changes in broad terms. "As we do every year, we made a lot of, we think, really smart and progressive changes," he said.

The eligibility rules now allow a single actor to receive multiple nominations in the same acting category. Under previous rules, if an actor had multiple performances in the top five vote tally for a category, only the performance with the highest votes would be nominated. In 2001, Steven Soderbergh was nominated for Best Director for both Erin Brockovich and Traffic and won the award for Traffic.

The policy for Best International Feature now allows more than one film per country or region to be nominated. A non-English language film can qualify by winning the top prize at Cannes, Berlin, Busan, Sundance, Toronto, or Venice. The award will be credited to the director rather than the submitting country, and directors' names will be included on the trophies and in the record books. Joachim Trier, who directed Sentimental Value, won Best International Feature for Norway this year, but the award technically went to Norway.

"Obviously, as the academy becomes more global, we need to think about how we are inviting international films into the Oscars conversation," Kramer said.

The Academy also increased the number of individuals eligible for Best Casting from two to three per film and set the shortlist for Best Cinematography at 20 films. The 99th Oscars will be held on Sunday, 14 March 2027, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Starting in 2029 and running through 2038, the ceremony will be held at the Peacock Theater and broadcast on YouTube instead of ABC.