A herd of Oscars.
Did you ever wonder how the Academy winnows down a year of movies into a tiny group of nominations? Well, if so, Variety has an explanation. Well, sort of an explanation. Some things the Academy will never be able to explain (“Dances With Wolves?”).
Here’s how they get to the nominations. Voters get ballots with five blank spaces for most categories, but ten for this year’s newly (and ridiculously) expanded Best Picture category. Each voter then lists his or her top five (or ten) choices in order of preference.
Simple, right? So does that just mean that the five films/people in each category with the most votes gets a nomination? Umm, no. Here we have Variety’s example:
The directors branch had 375 voting members (as of 2008). So the PWC mavens take the number of possible nominees in that category (five) and add one. That total, six, is divided into the 375, which yields the magic number of 63. In round one of nomination tallies, the PWC folks take all the directors’ ballots and count up voters’ first-place choices: Any contender who earns the magic number — 63 votes — automatically has enough for a nomination.
The PWC mavens then set aside the ballots of those members who voted for that director, never to look at the other choices, because that voter’s voice has been heard. (And it’s possible more than one director has achieved that magic number.)
Then the team goes to round two: They take the stack with the fewest number of votes, and look at the second choice, and redistribute the ballots among the stacks. However, if a voter picked a director who had already hit the magic number, they go to the voter’s next choice. For each round, they look to a voter’s next highest choice — second, third, fourth, fifth — so long as that director remains in the running and has not otherwise hit the magic number.
Yikes!! What’s the point? Why not just pick the choice with the most number one votes, then the next most, and so on? Well, they’re trying to avoid choosing a winner (or nominees) that is only a tiny percentage of the chosen. As in voters are wildly divided over the options and the number one choice is a movie that got, say only 29 votes, slimly outpacing the next choice with 28, or the third place with 25, or the ninth place with eleven. The “preferential” system is supposed to (I believe) find the strongest choices. I think.
And no, this doesn’t explain anything to do with the documentary branch. Or why “The Greatest Show on Earth” beat out “Singin’ in the Rain” in 1952 (that was pure studio politics, but we’ll save that distressing story for another day).
