08
Mar
With the Oscars being 3 weeks away, I thought this was the perfect time to explain how Oscar voting works.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is made up of 9,921 members. New members are selected every year and invited to join The Academy in 17 different branches ranging from acting, to costume design, to sound. When it comes time for Oscar nominations a list of all eligible films (films released in that calendar year with a minimum number of days in a minimum number of theaters) are sent to the members. Members of specific branches select the nominations for their category. So members of the sound branch select the nominees for sound. The only exception to this is Best Picture, which allows all members of the Academy to vote to select the nominees.
Because nominees are selected by that specific branch of the Academy, that makes getting a nomination a very high honor. Essentially your peers in that area of filmmaking decided that your work was one of the best five of the year!
When it comes time to vote for the winners, all members of the Academy vote for winners in all categories. This can mean that a film that isn’t well known can get a nomination, but not win because not every Academy member has time to watch every film, and will likely vote for the films they’ve seen or liked in certain categories. We see this time and time again in the Best Animated Feature category. Disney and Pixar films win year after year, not necessarily because they are the best, but most likely because every member of the Academy saw it and voted for it, and likely didn’t see some of the less popular nominated films in this category.
The place where all of this gets tricky is with Best Picture. Instead of picking one winner out of the list of 10 films. Academy members rank the films in order of what they would like to win. This is called the preferential ballot.
In 2008 the Academy expanded the Best Picture category from 5 nominees to 10 nominees. And they updated the way voting works. Because 10 films would be nominated, votes could end up spread out and a polarizing film could win with support from only a small percentage of voters. So the preferential ballot was introduced. Members rank the films, with the goal that the most widely liked film will win. If 1 film is ranked #1 by more than 50% of the ballots it wins, but that’s pretty unlikely when there are 10 films nominated. So the accounting firm sorts the ballots into stacks using the film that was put in the #1 position. When there isn’t a clear front runner (a film with more than 50% of the votes), the film with the least number of #1 ranked ballots gets redistributed using the #2 choice.
This process can be repeated for several rounds before one film has more than 50% of the votes. What this can mean is that films that most Academy members loved can win if enough people rank them #2 or #3, even if they aren’t considered as the most likely film to win.
For example, say you voted for West Side Story in the #1 position, but you put King Richard in the #2 position, and Belfast in the #3 position. If West Side Story has the least number of ballots for the #1 position, your ballot would be moved to the Kind Richard pile. But then what if after all the West Side Story ballots were redistributed, and still no film has over 50% of the ballots? Then the pile with the least would be redistributed using the #3 position. So say King Richard is now has the least number of ballots. Your ballot would move to the Belfast pile. And maybe enough people ranked Belfast as #2 or #3 and now after those 2 rounds, it has more than 50% percent of the vote and wins Best Picture. Please note this is an illustration and not at all trying to predict actual votes cast by Academy members.
The preferential ballot is confusing and I’m always trying to improve the way I explain it to people. Much credit goes to Scott Feinburg, his detailed article helped me truly understand the preferential ballot. I hope after this explanation you have a better understanding of how Oscars voting works!