Submission Guide: Awards

A. Introduction | B. Correcting existing data | C. Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

A. Introduction



• To begin submitting data, click on the relevant event on the IMDb Awards page, then scroll to the bottom and hit the yellow Edit Page button.
• Please note: It is not possible to submit awards data from specific name or title pages. The submissions form is only accessible via IMDb Awards.
• Please note: We are now accepting submissions for adding events. Please see this thread for details about how to submit.
• To submit an award you need to know the event name, the award name and possibly the award's category name if there is one. You further need to know the year, the award was given in, the ranking, i.e. win or nomination, and of course the recipient(s) and title(s) involved. Additional information can be put into a comment.

Event (e.g. Academy Awards)
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Award (e.g. Oscar)
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Category (e.g. Best Actor)
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Year (e.g. 2012)
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Rank (e.g. Win) | Recipient(s) (e.g. Jean Dujardin) | Title(s) (e.g. The Artist (2011))

 

• A detailed listing for the awards data with explanations and examples is available for first timers or to refresh your knowledge.
• Please also enter the source of the data you are submitting. Which web site, which book or newspaper have you gotten the information from? Note: giving an accessible data source, preferably a URL, for more recent awards is now mandatory.

B. Correcting existing data     top ^



• Events: We are now accepting submissions for adding events. Please see this thread for details about how to submit.
• Categories: To add or correct the name of a category, select the correct award from the dropdown, then type "Please add the new category Category Name" into the COMMENTS field at the bottom of the form.
• Recipients / Titles / Companies: Currently, the only way to edit existing recipient, title and/or company data is to submit a deletion request for the entire award, and resubmit it with the correct information.
• Please note: You may enter any freetext comments or corrections relating to the IMDb awards by choosing Miscellaneous Comments or Miscellaneous Corrections, then Awards from the main 'Update' form on any name or title page.
• Alternatively, please post a question on the IMDb Get Satisfaction community message board if you require more specific assistance.

C. Frequently asked questions (FAQ)     top ^



• If you should have additional questions not covered here, please feel free to post those
  in the IMDb contributor's message board.

• Submitting the correct year of an award to the IMDb awards section

• I have followed your submission guidelines painstakingly, but (some of) my submissions never appear online

• Unsuitable Events

• My award(s) is/are not listed at your site

• Movie XXX has been screened/invited at XXX film festival. Why doesn't it get listed as nominee for the event?

• Why doesn't the producer get listed as awardee/nominee of the 'Best Picture/Movie/Film' category for event XXX?

• Why are awards currently missing from IMDb not to be treated as corrections?

• Why is my submission of a DGA Award/MPSE Golden Reel Award win/nomination not accepted?

• Nominees/recipients for the foreign language Oscars

• Submitting data sources

• Where can I check whether any particular award is already listed?

Submitting the correct year of an award to the IMDb awards section     top ^



• Please be aware of the fact that as far as the IMDb awards lists are concerned we refer to the award events and thus to the awards given by the year these actually took place and not by the year the awards were given for, i.e. the year of eligibility.
• That basically means if an award ceremony took place in e.g. March 1993 honoring films made or released in 1992, we refer to this particular event as of 1993, not 1992.

I have followed your submission guidelines painstakingly, but (some of) my submissions never appear online.     top ^



• Your submissions may not have been processed for several reasons.
• The most common reason is that your submissions have been rejected, because some of the requested data is missing.
• Even if all requested data is provided, your submission may be discarded for one of the following reasons:
• Your data does not match other/usual data of the same event in one or more ways and there is no official reference data available to verify your submission.
  
• Your data does not match the data which has been published by the event's organizers, e.g. you may be sending in some names, but the official body usually publishes companies or no names at all as award recipients.
  
• Nominations especially for film festivals do usually not get added to the IMDb awards list, if no official reference data is available to verify those. Sending in nominations for minor or lesser known film festivals is explicitly discouraged.

• The second most common reason is, that your data has not been processed, because there is a backlog. That is especially true for the months of December until March when the Hollywood awards season is in full swing.
• Please also note that your submission may not be processed if it is for a more important - read better known - event and there is no (third party) reference data available to verify the claim. This can often, but not exclusively, happen for awards dated prior to the mid-1990s. The best way to overcome this hurdle is to always enter a valid data source for your submission in the according field of the submission form.

Unsuitable Events      top ^



• Please see Event Eligibility Criteria

My award(s) is/are not listed at your site     top ^



• Please add your awards according to the submission guidelines or ask for assistance if you don't know how to do this.
• Submitting comments like 'My five Emmy Awards are not listed. Please add those.' or 'My film XXX won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival' will not help much as those are lacking basic information without your awards cannot be added to the IMDb awards section.
  

Movie XXX has been screened/invited at XXX film festival. Why doesn't it get listed as nominee for the event?     top ^



• We will only accept Nominees for Festival Awards if they are named as such on the official site/documentation. Providing evidence of this along with your submission is strongly advised.
• An ‘official selection’ is not equivalent to a nomination for the purpose of submitting the film to our awards database
• Some festivals don't list nominees, instead every movie screened is eligible for the festival awards (e.g. Toronto, Seattle). This is not a festival competition in the classic sense and a festival screening cannot be considered an official nomination.
  

Why doesn't the producer get listed as awardee/nominee of the 'Best Picture/Movie/Film' category for event XXX?     top ^



• Although there may be a few exceptions from it, the following rule of thumb applies:
• Industry events like national film awards (Oscars, etc.) do usually honor the producer for best film while film festivals do honor the director.
• Also, please note that there are some events like the Golden Globes or the NAACP Image Awards, where the availability of historic data makes it impossible to list the proper recipients. Although it is clear in those cases, that the awards are given to the producer(s), IMDb lists these particular awards without any recipients, because those cannot be sorted out properly and guessing/assuming would do no justice to the real winners.
  

Why are awards currently missing from IMDb not to be treated as corrections?     top ^



• Please note that awards yet missing from the current IMDb listings are not to be treated as a fault in the actual data as far as submissions are concerned. Missing awards should be sent in via the regular awards submission form, but not in free-form text as a correction.
• Sending in missing awards data in a free form text comment or correction, will likely lead to your submitted data not being processed.
• For more information, please see the topic How/where do you get your information? How accurate/reliable is it? in our FAQs.

Why is my submission of a DGA Award/MPSE Golden Reel Award win/nomination not accepted?     top ^



• There are two guild award events, which need extra care, because of their rules of eligibility. Those are the DGA and the MPSE awards.
• Both events honor staff members giving out certificates on wins, while officially only directors or editors respectively are nominated and/or win the award actually.
  

Nominees/recipients for the foreign language Oscars     top ^



• Please note that although every country in the world may submit one film for academy award consideration there are only five official nominees for the foreign language Oscar each year. Only those five nominations get listed in the IMDb awards section.
• Please also note, that the foreign language Oscar is awarded to the film and not to the film's director, just the trophy is handed out to the director.
  

Submitting data sources     top ^

• Please note that we like to see some third party data source for awards. For high profile events that means we definitely like to stick to the official data published.

• The more high profile an event is, the more you will have difficulties to convince us that a person who is not officially listed as recipient needs to be attached to the IMDb listing of that particular award.

• e.g. the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) regularly nominates and awards in the category 'ensemble cast'. In their official press releases on their web site SAG merely lists the main cast for those awards and so does IMDb. If you want to submit a name of an actor or actress who played a minor role or even a bit part in the according movie, your submission will likely be rejected.
  

Where can I check whether any particular award is already listed?     top ^



• Any award or nomination listed on IMDb appears on three pages by design. For example, Lars von Trier won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival 2000 for the film Dancer in the Dark. In that case those pages are:
1. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001885/awards
   The recipient's personal awards page, reachable from the filmography by clicking on 'awards & nominations' on the left-hand-side menue.
2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168629/awards
   The movie's awards page, reachable from the movie's page by clicking on 'awards & nominations' on the left-hand-side menue. Of course this is not true for awards not related to a movie like e.g. lifetime achievement awards.
3. http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Cannes_Film_Festival/2000
   The award event's overview for the according year, reachable from a variety of places, in general from http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/ or http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Events respectively.