Best Movie Performances: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best Movie Performances is and who runs it

TheWrap is an entertainment industry publication based in California, and Best Movie Performances is its year-end reader vote on film acting. No outside contest platform is involved: thewrap.com is the host, the ballot and the publication at once, so the address a supporter types is a thewrap.com page and nothing else. The 2023 edition carried the on-page title "The Best Film Performances of 2023", and its introduction named Margot Robbie, Emma Stone and Michael Fassbender among the acting MVPs TheWrap saw and appreciated that year.

That wording matters for orientation. This is a critics-and-readers hybrid feature inside a larger year-end package, sitting alongside phrases printed on the same page such as "Best Movies of", "Best Actress", "Best Romance Movies of", "Best Supporting Actor" and "Best Film of". Those phrases are labels the page itself carries; the full slate of ballot options is not laid out as a numbered list anywhere on it.

The practical picture for a supporter is simple. The vote is public, TheWrap is the host, and the market is the whole of California, with no city or county attached to the program. TheWrap's listing places the magazine in California, and no city is named for it, so the ballot is best described as a statewide entertainment feature. The table collects those fixed points.

The December record from 2023 to 2026

The published run covers four Decembers: 2023, then 2024, then 2025, and the latest cycle in 2026. The program is annual, and every cycle opens and shuts within December itself. The 2023 ballot sits at https://www.thewrap.com/best-movie-performances-2023/ and the 2024 edition at https://www.thewrap.com/best-movie-performances-2024/, both on thewrap.com.

TheWrap has not printed the exact day voting opens, the exact day it closes, or whether a nomination round runs before the vote; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher also prints no eligibility rules and no limit on how often one reader may vote, so a reader planning repeat visits has nothing written to go on.

The next expected cycle would be 2027 if the December pattern holds, though TheWrap has not posted a forward calendar. Two further gaps deserve plain wording. No prize or recognition structure beyond publication on thewrap.com is described, and no round dates from any external voting platform exist because no external platform is involved. A reader planning a push around this ballot should therefore treat the December window as the only fixed point and watch the live page as the cycle approaches.

How a supporter votes on the ballot today

Because TheWrap hosts this itself, the mechanic is the plainest of any program in this family. A supporter opens the current Best Movie Performances page on thewrap.com, reads through the performances TheWrap has highlighted for that year, and casts votes for the favorites directly on that page. There is no separate platform to create an account on, no partner site to route through, and no code to enter; the ballot and the publication are the same address.

Since the host is the publisher, the page a reader votes on is also the page that explains the picks, which means context and voting sit side by side. The 2023 page, for example, framed its slate around the acting MVPs of the year before asking readers to weigh in.

The page leaves the voting rhythm unstated. Whether a reader may return daily, whether a sign-in is required, and whether votes from a single address are counted once or many times are all unstated. A supporter who wants to be sure a vote is tallied should simply follow whatever instructions the live ballot prints that year, since those instructions are the only authority on the mechanic. For readers weighing paid support on award-style ballots generally, our award votes overview explains the category. The steps above restate the sequence in the order a first-time visitor would meet it.

How this ballot differs from its California neighbours

Best Movie Performances sits apart from the other California programs in this directory. The six neighbours are all regional best-of ballots tied to places: the Central Valley business vote, the Marin edition, the Orange County edition, the San Diego and restaurants pairing, the Silicon Valley edition, and the North State Community's Choice Awards. Each of those is a local business or community vote, usually run by a chamber or a local publisher, and each belongs to its own market.

TheWrap's ballot is different on every axis that matters. It is statewide rather than city or county bound, it is about entertainment rather than services or restaurants, and thewrap.com hosts it instead of a contest platform. That difference changes how a supporter should think about it. A vote in Best of Orange County competes with local businesses for attention in one county, while a vote here competes with national film conversation for a reader's December attention.

It also means the audience is whoever reads TheWrap, an entertainment trade readership, rather than a chamber membership or a local shopper base. Links to each neighbouring program are listed below for readers comparing California ballots, and none of them shares a ballot, a host or a rulebook with this one.

Pushing a favorite performance the right way

Support for a performance on this ballot is mostly a matter of timing and reach. The window falls in December, so the readers most likely to vote are already immersed in year-end film conversation, and a fan pushing a favorite performance is competing with that noise. The practical moves are the ordinary ones: share the thewrap.com ballot link directly with people who actually care about the film, ask them to vote while the page is live, and remind them once rather than repeatedly. TheWrap has printed nothing about outside voting help, paid or unpaid, so the only written rule is whatever the live ballot carries. Any reader looking for a wider playbook that works on public votes of every kind can follow our guide on how to get more votes online.