Official Screen Credits for Academy Awards Consideration

Each year, Academy Awards^® are presented for outstanding achievements in Acting, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Directing, Documentary and Short Filmmaking, Film Editing, Makeup, Music, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects and Writing, as well as for Best Picture, Best Animated Feature Film and Best Foreign Language Film.

To be eligible for Academy Awards in most of the categories listed above, a feature film must open during the calendar year in a commercial motion picture theater in Los Angeles County and play for seven consecutive days.

The producer or distributor of the film must then fill out an Official Screen Credits (OSC) form which provides the Academy with full, verified production credits in all the fields in which Oscars are awarded. Submission of this form is an important step to qualifying a film and its creators for Academy Awards. Special rules apply to awards in the Documentary, Foreign Language, Animated Feature and Short Film categories. For a complete list of rules, please refer to the Official Academy Awards Rules booklet, published annually.

Information from the credits forms is also used for nominations announcements and press releases, as well as for the Scientific and Technical Awards, historical records and the Academy's publication Index to Motion Picture Credits.

Index to Motion Picture Credits Database

The credits in the IMPC database were originally collected and printed in the Academy publication Annual Index to Motion Picture Credits. The Index started in 1934 as the Screen Achievement Records Bulletin, when the Writers Branch of the Academy began publishing a bulletin of screen authorship records.

Every year, as part of the Academy Awards process, the Academy gathers credits from films hoping to qualify for awards. To these credits, compiled and verified by the film's producer or distributor, we add credits from other films released in Los Angeles County, using research materials from the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library.

In addition to personal credits, IMPC records index production and releasing companies, MPAA ratings, running times, Los Angeles release dates, color, language, song titles, source authors and source material, all of which are searchable.

Annual Index to Motion Picture Credits

This comprehensive reference work includes production information and cast-and-crew credits provided by the producers and distributors of these films or obtained from the files maintained by the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. Credits are indexed by film title, by craft or by name. Additional features include a list of the year's releases organized by production company, a cumulative list of films cataloged from 1976 to the present, and a comprehensive listing of Oscar and Scientific and Technical Award winners and nominees.