New Best Picture Vote-Tallying Rules

In the past, when there were five nominees for Best Picture, a winner was figured out pretty easily: everybody in the Academy picked the one they liked, and the movie with the most votes won.

That meant one movie could get as low as 20% + 1 votes and still win. But now that there will be ten Best Picture nominees, one movie could get as low as 10% + 1 votes and still win, which is apparently too low, because they're changing the rules.

It's complicated, so instead of rehashing it, I'll give you Entertainment Weekly's explanation from Dave Karger:

Once the 10 nominees are named, voters will rank the films from 1 to 10. All the No. 1 votes will be counted, and if no film has more than 50 percent of the vote (which will certainly be the case), the last-place film will be eliminated and the voters who voted for that film will have their No. 2 votes counted instead. That process will continue until one film has a majority of the votes. As Pond points out, there is a chance that the film that ends up winning won’t actually have the most No. 1 votes, but will instead emerge the victor in the second, third, or fourth rounds. But I’d rather see that happen than have a Best Picture with a paltry 11 percent of the vote.

Karger's right. Not to get all Voting Theory on you (actually, I think we're already past that point), but this is a much more fair way to try and figure out which movie is the overall best. Well, in my opinion -- the whole idea of Voting Theory is that there's no one right way to do it, especially when rankings are involved.

Let's say Musical Biopic gets ranked #2 on 100% of the ballots but not a single person ranks it #1. And let's say Holocaust Movie gets ranked #1 on 20% of the ballots but #10 on all the other ballots. Which movie did better? According to the new rules, Musical Biopic, because it'll hit the 50% mark much sooner.

The rules put in place are actually very similar to the rules they have for figuring out the nominees, so it's not something they're pulling out of their butt. But it could mean, as the above example illustrates, that movies with a small-but-vocal group of supporters will get shafted in favor of a movie with broad but moderate support. In the latter group I'm thinking a movie like Up, that a lot of people would put in their top five but few would put at #1.

On the other hand, making each member rank all ten films might guilt more members into actually watching all ten films like they're supposed to. So it could have some unverifiable benefits.

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