The Oscars aren’t immune from unplanned strangeness (after all, who can forget 2017’s Moonlight vs. La La Land best-picture mix-up and all the inimitable celebrity reactions it spawned?), but sometimes, the shocker is coming from inside the Academy.
There have been a whopping seven ties over the Oscars’ nearly 100-year history, with the latest taking place on Sunday night, when Sam Davis’s The Singers and Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata’s Two People Exchanging Saliva both won in the best-live-action-short category at the 2026 Oscars.
Here—for the Hollywood trivia fans out there—we’ve rounded up the rest of the Oscars’ shocking ties. Revisit every one below.
Fredric March and Wallace Beery for Best Actor, 1932
March technically beat out Beery by one vote, but they both took home Oscar statuettes that night (and forced the Academy to change its rules with their tandem wins).
So Much for So Little and A Chance to Live for Best Documentary Short, 1950
Thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can actually watch at least one of these Oscar-winning short films above (and marvel at how far we’ve come).
Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand for Best Actress, 1969
Oh, Ingrid Bergman was delighted about this one, you could tell. It’s only too bad that Hepburn wasn’t there to share in the excitement.
Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got and Down and Out in America for Best Documentary (Feature), 1987
Sure, a tie might not be any filmmaker’s explicit Oscars dream, but it’s still pretty damn good (especially when Oprah is informing you that you’ve made one of the two top documentary features of the year!).
Trevor and Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life for Best Live-Action Short Film, 1995
“It’s a tie! Oh, mon Dieu,” said presenter Tim Allen as he awarded the Oscar to two different live-action short films for the first (but not last!) time in Oscars history.
Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall for Best Sound Editing, 2013
Both of these films were nominated for a slew of different Oscars in 2013, so it’s safe to say that nobody went home a loser.
The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva for Best Live-Action Short, 2026
Am I the only one who thought presenter Kumail Nanjiani was doing a comedy-boy prank when he announced that these two films had tied for the Oscar? As it turns out, he was not.
