Voting for 'Best Picture' just got more complicated

By Sarah Sluis

Oscar pools are already going to be completely upended this year, since ten films will be competing for Best Picture. Now Academy voters are going to have to think even more strategically about their own choices. The Academy has adopted a preferential voting system, which is often used when there are a large number of candidates in an election. It requires one film to receive a majority of votes to win.

If a film doesn't receive a majority in the first round, the #2 choices of the losing (#10-ranked) film are counted as a #1 choice. This continues, with a new loser designated each round, until there is a film with over 50% of the ballots. This process was used to choose Best Picture until 1945, a nod to the Academy's old method of nominating 10, not 5, films for Best Picture. What could make this process interesting is if there were a distinct "minority group" that made the same 1-2 choice. While they wouldn't win, all of their redistributed votes could sway the Best Picture race one way. The political equivalent is if a minority ethnic group wants to elect one of their own. They vote for their leader, but as their #2 choice they pick a competing politician who is sympathetic to their interests. If Academy voters are grouped by age, affinity for independent/WWII and the Holocaust/costume drama/epic/musical, it's possible that distinctive ranking patterns will emerge. Too bad the exact voting breakdowns won't be revealed.

The easy scenario:

• Over 50% of members declare a film their #1. It receives Best Picture. Phew.

A more complicated scenario:

• Let's say there are three front runners. Altogether, 92% of Academy voters pick one of these films as
  
  their #1, but none of them will have a majority vote. Only 8% of the
  
  votes will be redistributed, which would only be enough to push a film
  
  that's already in the mid-40's to over 50%. That means that the #3 film, which almost a third of Academy voters picked as their #1, will instead get redistributed according to its #2s. People will definitely be speculating about genres and types of films, and what kind of person would pick, say, a sci-fi film like Avatar as their #1 choice and the musical Nine as their second choice.

Until we know what films have been nominated, these kinds of speculations are endless. But I think it's reasonable to speculate that there will be two to four front runners, and having one of those front runners eliminated and redistributed according to the voters' #2 choices could dramatically change the outcome of Best Picture.