Those within Hollywood who do need to pay attention to how the voting process works (potential nominees, their producers/agents/managers, studio execs, etc), know it is more complicated than that. But, according to Variety et al, very few of them truly understand how it works. Everyone seems to say only those guys at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (yes, PWC does the counting for the Oscars ... surprise!) understand it ... or they say, ask your accountant to explain.
This is what I understand.
The easy part. Now, there are nearly 6,000 Academy members.
Academy refers to AMPAS, or Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It is in Beverly Hills.
Who are Academy members? Basically, they get invited if it is agreed they have offered significant contributions to the industry - or more regularly these days, they are automatically invited if they were nominated for/won an Oscar.
Now, everybody gets a nominations ballot, for five places per category. (Eventually, a few categories only have three nominees; the Documentary Short Subject is the odd one out, always only four.) However, directors only nominate directors, and sound editors only sound editors, etc. Everyone nominates for the Best Picture category.
The type of voting system is called 'preferential balloting', and apparently it is one of the more complicated types of voting systems but it is to ensure the fairest accounting for a contest that has multiple winners (in this case, five 'winners' for nomination spots).
The main feature is that, when you're voting, you rank your choices. Let's say, if I were to vote, this is how I'd vote:
1 - Slumdog Millionaire
2 - The Dark Knight
3 - Frost/Nixon
4 - The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
5 - WALL•E
What happens if you misspelled the names, or have terrible handwriting? If it's clearly legible, PWC will count it. However, if you vote, say, Meryl Streep for Sound Editing, then they won't count it.
Here's the thing, NOT ALL YOUR VOTES WILL BE COUNTED. What does that mean?
To ensure that everybody's voices are heard, this complicated formula is used.
Explanations tend to use the example for Best Directing nominees. There are 375 members in the directing branch of the Academy. PWC divides that number by 6 (5 eventual nominees + 1 ... no one seems to have explained the +1 bit so far). 375/6 ≈ 62. Then you take 62 + 1 (again, not explained why), and you end up with the figure 63. [* Okay, I do have a theory on the "+1" bit.]
(This year, the magic figure derived from the 197 cinematographers is 33; for the 1,222 actors, 204.)
Now you start counting the ballots, one by one - but YOU ONLY COUNT THE FIRST CHOICE. PWC will place the ballots in piles - all those voting for Danny Boyle for their 1st choice in one pile, those for David Fincher for 1st choice in another pile, etc. If any nominee gets more than 63, then they're in.
Now, two scenarios. This process yields five nominees - then the matter's settled. You have five nominees. (The magic number ensures that you can never have more than five nominees, even if there are tied votes. I think.) The second scenario is that less than five (possibly even zero in a very divided year) nominees have more than 63 votes. What now?
Here's where it gets a little bit fuzzy. What's clear is that PWC ignores all ballots whose 1st choice has secured a spot. (Let's say you voted for Boyle or Fincher, and they have more than 63 each. Then your ballot is retired from the rest of the process.)
Variety says that PWC then go to the smallest piles of the remaining ballots, and redistribute them onto larger piles based on 2nd place choices (and perhaps later on, selections three to five). This process of redistribution eventually results in five piles with the requisite number of ballots in them.
BoxOfficeMojo says that the movie with the least number of ballots is eliminated, and its ballots redistributed among the remaining movies, according to each ballot's next available choice. If the No. 2 choice is not for a remaining movie, then the No. 3 choice is used, and so on.
Okay, it took me a while to get this, though I may still be slightly wrong. One thing is clear: winners in the following rounds (2nd, 3rd, 4th, a maximum of 5th) need to have at least one 1st choice vote (as in, at least one voter marked this film as their first choice) to qualify for the nomination.
Let's say, the first round has yielded Boyle, Fincher, Van Sant and Howard. Now, all those votes are removed. You're left with small piles of Daldry, Mendes, Nolan, and a really small pile for Eastwood. So you take the Eastwood pile, and distribute it to the other three piles according to the 2nd choice votes. Daldry comes out top, and obviously it has garnered its share of 1st choice votes, so that makes directing nominee No. 5.
What does this all mean?
It means, even if Bruce Springsteen's song "The Wrestler" was really popular (it is), but many voters liked "O Saya" from Slumdog Millionaire most coz that's what they remember most from the film, thanks to its thumping rhythms, they put The Wrestler at 2nd or 3rd choice ... and somehow, there are enough votes in the first round for "O Saya", "Jai Ho" and "Down To Earth" (WALL•E) so the process doesn't go into the second round, so the Boss lost out. (The real mystery though, is why only three nominations for Best Original Song this year?)
UPDATE: Apparently a different system is used for the Original Song nominations. Read explanation here.
UPDATE: Apparently a different system is used for the Original Song nominations. Read explanation here.
It means, there is an exponential (nonlinear) decrease in power from your 1st choice vote to your 2nd choice vote, and your 2nd choice vote to your 3rd choice vote, and so on. For example, many people would have thought that an obvious voting system would be the weighted sort (10 points for 1st choice, 8 points for 2nd choice ... 2 points for 5th choice; then calculate the aggregate), which is a linear system. I guess the Academy likes the preferential voting system because it really emphasises the BEST of that category.
It means, that dark horses get a shot as well as consensus ones. This is how Little Miss Sunshine or Seabiscuit got in for previous years' Oscars. Maybe Juno wasn't your favourite film that year, but you really think it belongs in the nominations list, so you mark it as 1st choice to ensure it's in, because you expect other people not to nominate it at all. Enough of such voters, and a dark horse gets in. It's similar to how there is a disproportional percentage of 1-point and 10-point ratings for any film in IMDb.com.
And this means, annoyingly for The Dark Knight fans, that most Academy voters did not think of The Dark Knight as their No. 1 film of the year.
How are the eventual winners decided, after the nominations? Simple. Academy members now get the full list of nominations, and now all will vote for all categories (as in, even if you're just a sound editor, you get to vote for all categories too). [Although, there is a slightly different process for certain categories (foreign language film, documentaries, short films), because not all Academy members have time (read: bothered) to watch these less glamorous films.] Of course, this time you only get one choice per category, and the winner is determined through the 'first past the post' system. (I first heard of this term during the last UK general election.)
And guess what, I have seen the Oscar voting ballots before, hehe.
One final thing. People ask sometimes, what happens if the presenter uttered the wrong name? This usually comes from people who were extremely annoyed to see Jack Nicholson announce Crash as the winner instead of Brokeback Mountain, or when Marisa Tomei won Best Supporting Actress two decades ago, or ... well, many examples. According to PWC, this can never happen, because two of their employees will be at the ceremony to hand out the envelopes to the presenters, and they have memorised the winning list, and should the presenter make a mistake, they will actually go up to the mic and correct it. This has never happened before, of course.
* The first +1 is to decrease slightly the amount of votes needed for a film to qualify - as in, if a director needed 375/5 votes to join the nomination, then you almost certainly will not have five nominees at the end of the first round (375/5 > 375/6), because it is almost certain that there are more than 5 directors from which voters would've picked for their first choice. The second +1 is to increase the qualifying number by a little smidge, to make sure there is no such thing as a sixth nominee (for example, 6 films getting 62 votes each).
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