How to Organize an Oscar Pool

Want to add a little excitement to your Academy Awards party? Organize an Oscar pool for guests to choose their picks to win all the major awards! An Academy Awards pool gets guests totally engaged and inspired to take their best guess at the winners. An Oscar pool will also encourage your guests to go see the nominated films ahead of time, which is a fun thing to do during the winter months.

What you need to know about how to organize an Oscar pool is that you'll need to prepare an Oscar ballot. These can be downloaded from The Oscars website here.  You can also be crafty and create your own ballot. To create a great DIY ballot, focus on which categories you'd like to include. It’s best to go with basic categories like Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, etc. Throw in more obscure categories that encourage your guests to guess, like Best Costume Design and Best Foreign Language Film. It'll also help to avoid ties because these are the hardest categories!

Don’t forget to keep score! To avoid helping any cheaters, have guests fill out their ballot before the show, then randomly exchange ballots so everyone is scoring someone else's ballot. Be sure to appoint an official scorekeeper to tally the score so everything is even at the end of the night.

Just like the official Academy, it’s time to determine a winner and add up the totals to award the winning prize. Throw together a prize basket of Oscar and movie-themed items like a DVD of a nominated film, movie passes, a fake Oscar statue, and  movie candy. Whether they take home the prize or not, guests will be super entertained and will start looking forward to your Oscar party the next year!

Ready to plan your own Oscars party? Get started with one of our exclusive Oscars party invitations!