Since 2000, the defending Best Actress winner has not repeated at the next Oscars a single time: 0 of 25 years, a 0% repeat rate. The same holds in three more categories over the same 2000–2025 span. Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress each returned 0 of 25 as well.
We went in expecting a rate. Something small and interesting, the kind of number you can put on a card and argue about at a party. What we got back was four zeros in a row, which is less a finding than a wall.
The honest part: we had already written the paragraph about the exception. The one where you name the single strange year, point at it, and explain why it was strange. We deleted it, because in these four Oscar categories from 2000 through 2025, there is no single strange year.
What did we actually check?
One question, asked twenty-five times, four separate ways. Take the person or the script holding the Oscar in a given category. Next year rolls around. Do they win it again?
Across 2000–2025, in Best Actress, the answer came back no twenty-five times out of twenty-five. Same in Best Original Screenplay. Same in Best Supporting Actor. Same in Best Supporting Actress. Four categories, twenty-five years apiece, zero repeats in any of them.
What we did not check is whether the defending winner was even in the running the following year. Our numbers say nothing about nominations, so we are not going to pretend they do. All we know is who won, and that the name at the top never came back the very next year in these four Oscar races during that span.
| Oscar category | Years checked | Defending winner repeated | Repeat rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Actress | 25 (2000–2025) | 0 | 0% |
| Best Original Screenplay | 25 (2000–2025) | 0 | 0% |
| Best Supporting Actor | 25 (2000–2025) | 0 | 0% |
| Best Supporting Actress | 25 (2000–2025) | 0 | 0% |
Four rows. One column doing absolutely nothing.
Why does the field reset so completely?
We can only guess, and we want to be upfront that this part is guessing rather than data. A performer or a screenwriter has to go find another project, get it made, get it released inside a twelve-month window, and land in the same conversation again. That is a lot of moving parts to line up on an annual clock.
Compare that with a category attached to something that returns on a schedule. If the same thing can simply come back, it can simply win again. If the contender has to be rebuilt from scratch every year, the category effectively holds a new election each time. Our four Oscar categories, 2000–2025, look like the second kind, and they look like it unanimously.
There is a version of this where the structure of the category matters more than the quality of anyone's work, and we find that quietly comforting. Nobody is being punished. The calendar is just difficult.
Does this change your Oscar ballot?
Yes, and in the least glamorous way possible. It closes off a shortcut.
Here is the shortcut. You are filling out a ballot for the 2027 Oscars, you hit a category you have not thought about, and your brain offers up the most available name in the room: whoever won it last time. It feels like knowledge. It is fast, it is confident, and in these four Oscar categories across 2000–2025 it went 0 for 25.
Run it out end to end. Say your group scores one point per correct pick, the way most pools in our scoring guide do. You write the defending winner in Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. Based on 2000–2025, that is four lines of your ballot returning nothing, in the exact categories where a differentiating pick is cheapest to make. Meanwhile the person next to you, who spent thirty extra seconds on each of those four, is four points ahead of you before the montage.
That is the whole practical takeaway. Not "be a genius." Just "do not reuse last year's answer key."
- In these four Oscar categories, 2000–2025, the defending winner is not the safe pick. It is the pick with a 0% track record over that span.
- Spend your thinking time here, not on the category everybody in the room already agrees about.
- If your pool has a tiebreaker, this is where the tie gets broken, so read your tiebreaker rules before you shrug.
Isn't 25 years too small a sample to mean anything?
Fair, and we like this objection because it is the one a stats-literate friend raises before you finish the sentence. Twenty-five years is not enormous. Our data also starts in 2000 and knows nothing whatsoever about the decades before it, so every claim here is a claim about 2000–2025 and nothing else.
But think about what a modest repeat rate would predict. Say, purely as a hypothetical, that one of these categories repeated one year in five. Over twenty-five years you would expect to see repeats show up, more than once, and you would certainly expect at least one across four categories running side by side. We saw none. Four independent-looking categories all landing on zero is a weaker result than a huge sample, and a much stronger result than a single lucky column.
So we are not telling you it is impossible. We are telling you that in 2000–2025, across these four Oscar categories, it did not happen, and a pick with no successes behind it in that window is a strange place to spend your confidence.
How does this compare with the Emmys?
Differently, and the contrast is the useful part. Our Emmy dataset covers eight categories from 2000 to 2025, and there the defending champion does sometimes come back.
21%
#At the Emmys, the defending champ holds the envelope just 21% of the time. Chalk is a lie.
Across 200 Emmy category-years (2000–2025), the previous year's winner repeated 42 times.
That card is Emmy data, not Oscar data, and the two should not be blended: the Emmy repeat rate above sits next to a flat 0 of 25 in each of the four Oscar categories we checked over the same 2000–2025 window. Same span, very different behavior. The Emmys have categories where a defending champion is a live option. These four Oscar categories, in that window, did not produce one.
4.6/22
#Copy last year's winners onto all 22 categories and you'd average 4.6 right. Bold picks win pools.
The "just pick the incumbents" ballot lands around 21% of the card. The pool is won in the categories that turn over.
Also Emmy data, and also a warning label. An all-incumbents ballot is a strategy people actually play, at both ceremonies, usually while explaining that they are being sensible. If you want the longer version of why some categories churn and others do not, we wrote that up using the Emmy numbers in streaks vs. turnover, and the same question asked across our wider 2000–2025 Oscar set lives in the defending champion post.
Where do you put this on your ballot?
Start a pool at /start, get everyone's picks in, and then watch what happens in the four categories nobody wanted to think about. If you would rather not stare at a blank sheet, the Oscars ballot generator will hand you a filled-in one to argue with, which is often the faster way to find out what you actually believe. New to running one of these, or inheriting the job from someone who quit? The how an Oscar pool works guide covers the boring setup so you can get back to the fun part.
We do not hold anything but the scoreboard. What your group plays for is between you.
And if somebody at your party writes down last year's winner in all four of these, congratulate them warmly. They have just built the most confident zero in the room.