Each year, Cosmo voters are asked to fill out a separate Ratings Ballot to measure the popularity of each film, including those that did not receive nominations in any categories. This ballot is used to issue awards in three additional categories: Most Watched, Highest Rated, and Most Popular.

It should be noted, however, that not every voter completes their Ratings Ballot, and as a result, it may seem that a film may receive category nominations even if the results of the Rating Ballot imply that no one actually saw it. In these situations, the voters who nominated it very likely did not complete their Ratings Ballot (unless it was simply nominated for Best Trailer or Original Song, which doesn't actually require watching the actual film).

Most Watched - This winner is the film which received the most ratings from voters who returned their ratings ballot. The Cosmique Movie Awards have always been as much about what draws us to the theater as they are about what we liked once we got there, and so this award is for the film's marketing department for getting us to see the film whether we liked it or not.

Highest Rated - Each voter rates each film on a scale of one to ten - with one representing one of the worst films of all time and ten representing one of the best of all time, two representing one of the worst of the year, nine representing one of the best of the year, and ten representing one of the best of all time. The average rating is meant to show the general reaction of the voters to the film. Individual voters may disagree (we have seen films receive a 10 from one voter and a 1 from another), but the average will reflect the general sense of the voters. But if there are too few voters, the accuracy of the rating goes out the window. For that reason, films must receive ratings from at least 25% of the voters in order to be ranked and considered for the honor of "Highest Rated."

Most Popular - The most important ratings award at the Cosmos is Most Popular - a category that attempts to measure both the breadth and depth of support for a given film. In previous years, we did this by simply creating a sum total of each film's ratings. This created a handy mechanism to compare films rated in the same year, but the Board of Governors later realized that it would be impossible to compare films from different years if the number of voters varied. To compensate, they created an index based on the percent of voters that rated a given film rather than the number of voters. The scale ranges from zero to one thousand. For a film to receive a score of a thousand, it would need to have been seen by 100% of the voters submitting their ratings ballot, and would have need to achieve a perfect score of 10 from each person. On this scale, if one film was seen by 100% of the voters and received an average score of 5.0, and another film was seen by 50% of the voters and received a perfect 10.0 average, both would receive identical Weighted Index scores of 500 and would be considered to be equally popular.