How Many Times Has There Been a Tie at the Oscars?

Something a bit unprecedented happened at The Oscars on Sunday, March 15: a tie! Kumail Nanjiani was announcing the award for Best Live Action Short Film, and when he let the audience know that there was a tie vote, he had to clarify that he was not joking.

Nanjiani announced The Singers as the first winner, and after the creators accepted the honor, he revealed that Two People Exchanging Saliva had also won an Oscar in the category. While this doesn’t happen often, it is not the first time there’s been a tie at the Oscars.

In fact, there have been six other occasions where the Academy Awards had a tie vote. It first happened in 1931/32 in the Best Actor category. Frederic March won for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wallace Beery won for The Champ. March actually had one more vote than Beery, but at the time, the rules stated that if another participant came within three votes of the winner, they would also receive a statue (this has since been changed, and today, there has to be an exact tie to have two winners).

In 1949, there was a tie in the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category when A Chance to Live and So Much for So Little both won. Perhaps the biggest tie, though, was in the Best Actress category in 1968: Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand took home Oscars for The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl, respectively.

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In 1986, the Best Documentary (Feature) award went to both Artie Shaw: Time Is All You Got and Down and Out in America. There was another tie in 1994 in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category, with Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Trevor both winning.

Before the 2026 tie, the most recent neck-in-neck race was in 2012 when Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty tied for Best Sound Editing.