I was scrolling through the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards nominees on my phone, half-paying attention, when something caught my eye. Not a nomination. The opening remarks. Hiroki Totoki, the President and CEO of Sony Group Corporation, would once again be delivering them. The CEO of Sony. Opening an awards show. For anime.
I put my phone down and thought about that for a second. Imagine if Tim Cook walked out at the Oscars to kick things off, not to present an award, but to welcome everyone to Apple's big night. You'd think, Oh, so this is an Apple event. You wouldn't confuse it for an independent celebration of cinema. You'd know exactly what you were watching.
And yet somehow, ten years into the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, we keep treating them like they're the anime Oscars. They are not. They are a marketing event with a velvet rope.
To understand who the Anime Awards actually serve, you have to follow the corporate nesting dolls.
Crunchyroll is owned by Sony. Specifically, it's a joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment, which handles the business operations, and Aniplex, which handles anime production and studio relationships. Aniplex is a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment Japan. So Sony, through its various arms, produces anime, licenses anime, streams anime on Crunchyroll, and then gives awards to anime through the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. The company that makes the thing, sells the thing, and distributes the thing is also the company that decides which things are the best things.
This would be like if Netflix ran the Emmys. And also produced half the shows. And also owned the TV network that broadcast the ceremony. And then had its CEO open the show with a little speech about how grateful he was to all the creators. The creators who work for him.
"But the fans vote!" you might say. And yes, they do, but probably less than you think. The process works like this: a panel of judges, all selected by Crunchyroll, produce a shortlist of six nominees per category. Those nominees then go to both a public fan vote and a judges' vote, weighted 70% judges and 30% fans. This sounds like a system with checks and balances until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
Crunchyroll selects the judges. The judges control 70% of the outcome. And on the fan side, the most-watched show on the platform, which is to say the show Crunchyroll promoted the hardest, tends to dominate. So whether you look at the jury lane or the popular lane, the gravitational pull is toward whatever Crunchyroll already has the most invested in. This is how you get outcomes like Solo Leveling sweeping nine categories in 2025, including Anime of the Year, while critically beloved series like Frieren: Beyond Journey's End lost the top prize despite broader critical acclaim. Not because Solo Leveling is bad (it's a perfectly fun show) but because the structure of the awards is designed to reward scale, not craft. And scale is what Crunchyroll's recommendation algorithm already optimizes for.
The Solo Leveling saga is actually the best lens for understanding what the Awards really are.
In 2025, Solo Leveling, an adaptation of a Korean manhwa rather than a Japanese manga, swept the ceremony. Critics were frustrated. Industry people were frustrated. Even some of the judges were apparently frustrated, with former Crunchyroll employee Miles Atherton and regular judges Geoff Thew and Tristan Gallant publicly dissecting the problems with the voting methodology on their podcast.
One issue was timing. The voting period for the 2025 awards overlapped with the airing of Solo Leveling's second season, which wasn't even eligible. But it didn't matter. The show was top-of-mind because new episodes were dropping weekly, and that recency bias flooded the ballot. A show that was supposed to be judged on its 2024 run got a massive boost from its 2025 marketing cycle.
Then came 2026. Solo Leveling Season 2, which many fans consider superior to the first, was mysteriously absent from the Anime of the Year nominations, despite winning the award just last year. It did show up in other categories, like Best Continuing Series and Best Song, but not the big one. Why?
No one at Crunchyroll has explained this. Some fans speculate it was pulled to avoid a repeat controversy, to "give other shows a chance." But if that's the case, you have to ask: what kind of awards show engineers its own results to manage PR? That's not an awards show. That's programming.
The exclusion problem goes deeper than Solo Leveling. This year, major titles like Lord of Mysteries and To Be Hero X, both donghua (Chinese animated series), were completely shut out of the nominations. These are shows that Crunchyroll streams. These are shows with passionate global fanbases. But they were apparently ineligible, or at least un-nominated, because they aren't Japanese.
This is where the awards reveal a quiet gatekeeping function. The ceremony is called the "Anime Awards," not the "Japanese Animation Awards," and it's run by a platform that streams content from multiple countries. But the eligibility rules still treat "anime" as a national category rather than a medium. The result is a show that wants to position itself as the definitive global celebration of animation excellence while simultaneously excluding the fastest-growing segments of the animation world.
It's a strange position for Crunchyroll to hold, especially given that Sony, their parent company, has financial interests in expanding the definition of what counts as anime-adjacent content. You'd think the business incentives would push toward inclusion. But the Awards aren't really optimizing for business logic in that direction. They're optimizing for brand identity: Crunchyroll as the home of anime, defined narrowly enough to maintain cultural authority but broadly enough to absorb whatever generates subscribers.
Here's the thing about awards shows in general: they've always been, at some level, industry events masquerading as cultural milestones. The Oscars were invented by Louis B. Mayer partly to mediate labor disputes. The Grammys have been a record-label showcase since day one. The Game Awards are functionally a Geoff Keighley production that doubles as a trailer reel for upcoming releases.
But most of those shows at least maintain the fiction of independence. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a separate organization from any studio. The Recording Academy is technically independent from the labels. These are thin fictions, of course. Anyone who's followed an Oscar campaign knows how much money studios pour into lobbying. But they're structurally important fictions. They create enough daylight between the awarder and the awardee that the exercise retains some credibility.
The Crunchyroll Anime Awards don't even bother with the fiction. The company that awards the trophies is the same company that distributes the shows, and the corporate sibling of the studios that produce them. Crunchyroll selects the judges, controls the nomination process, runs the voting, produces the ceremony, streams the ceremony on its own platform, and then uses the results in its marketing for the next twelve months. The whole thing is a closed loop.
As the columnists at Anime News Network put it, the Awards have become "a big PR stunt now, with a bunch of questionable strings attached." They suggested the minimum viable fix would be separating the awards from Crunchyroll entirely and running them through an independent organization, something like the American Manga Awards, which are judged by industry professionals with strict criteria and no platform affiliation. That model isn't perfect, either, but it at least introduces the structural separation that makes an award feel like an award rather than a press release.
I don't think awards shows are inherently pointless. In fact, I think they can be genuinely valuable, especially for an industry like anime, where the sheer volume of seasonal releases makes it impossible for any one person to watch everything. A well-run awards process can surface overlooked work, direct attention to exceptional craft, and give creators a form of recognition that transcends raw viewership numbers.
But that only works if the institution giving the award has some independence from the commercial interests that benefit from the outcome. When the company that profits from a show's popularity is also the company deciding which shows are "the best," the award stops being a signal of quality and starts being a signal of investment. It tells you what Crunchyroll wants you to watch next, not what was actually the best anime of the year.
And this matters because anime fans are not stupid. They can feel the difference between an award that validates their taste and an award that tries to shape it. The backlash over Solo Leveling's sweep, the frustration over donghua exclusions, the growing cynicism about the judging process: these aren't just fan grievances. They're the audience correctly identifying that the Awards serve the platform first and the art second.
The Weeknd is presenting Anime of the Year this time around, which is a neat bit of celebrity booking. He gave a lovely quote about how Samurai Champloo changed his life, how Nujabes shaped House of Balloons. I believe him. But the ceremony he's presenting at isn't really about celebrating the kind of transformative artistic experience he's describing. It's about Sony throwing a party for its own catalog and inviting famous people to make it look prestigious.
You can enjoy the party. I'll probably watch the livestream myself. But let's stop pretending it's the anime Oscars. It's a launch event with trophies.