(Still the world's most disturbing photo, as it is like Oscars + zombies + mummies + that weird Chinese terra cotta army thing + the end of E.T. when everything's shrouded in plastic and scary Peter Coyote breaks into the house in a HazMat suit. Nightmares!
Anyway.)
It’s almost Gay Super Bowl Sunday! So get out your office Oscar pool ballots, because here at The Gospel According to John, it’s time for entirely too much analysis (annual Should Win/Will Wins to come!) of an empty, meaningless, rigged event that is sure to be the world’s boringest awards show because every category is already decided!
Except for maybe **ominous music** BEST PICTURE. For here, the Academy's decision to unearth a preferential tabulation system not used since 1943 puts a potential Bush v. Gore situation on our hands, except with the added intrigue of a possible outcome wherein Nader actually wins.
Don’t believe me? Read on, MacDuff.
This year, everyone seems to be divided into two Best Picture camps: “I am easily dazzled by pretty colors and Dances With Fern Gully is gonna rule this shit!” or “I am savvy so I know that Actual Filmmaking Instead of 3D Videogamery is favored to take the gold so Cameron can go suck a big bag of d’s!”
I guess there’s also a third category: “Who the fuck cares.” But that’s neither here nor there. The point is: you’re all wrong, because the Academy’s shameless-ploy-for-ratings-cloaked-in-faux-populism doubling of the number of nominees means that the potential for a non-majority winner (a film must win more than 50% of the vote to win) is much, much higher than a year with only five nominees. So, the Academy and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the accounting firm responsible for tallying the votes, will use the “preferential” voting system they use for the nomination process.
Here’s how it works: Each voting Academy member got a separate ballot just for Best Picture this year. Instead of simply choosing one film like every other year, voters were asked to rank the Best Picture nominees one to 10 according to their preference—casting a weighted vote for every film on the list. Academy members have found this task incredibly confusing. I’m not sure why, but my assumption is that it's because people in Hollywood can’t even wipe their own asses without directions, let alone follow some convoluted process that asks them to quantify their like or dislike of ten films relative to each other.
But whatever. So they rank them one to 10. Then, today—as we speak!—couriers show up to every voting Academy member’s home to collect his/her Best Picture ballot by hand, which is ludicrous, but that’s how completely silly this race has gotten this year. Then, the tabulators at Pricewaterhouse Coopers (or, PwC) will separate the ballots into ten stacks, one per film, each stack composed of the ballots ranking that film #1.
All this is done by hand, by
the way. No, seriously.
All these votes are tabulated, and if one of the films gets 50% of the vote, we’re done. However, it’s almost certain, mathematically, that this will not happen this year. So, PwC will (again, by hand) take the 10th-place stack—the film with the fewest #1 ranks and hence the fewest ballots—and redistribute those ballots to the piles for the films they list in the #2 rank.
So let’s say “An Education” has the fewest #1 votes. You and I have both listed “An Education” at #1, and you’ve listed “Avatar” at #2 because you’re a retard, while I’ve listed “The Hurt Locker” at #2 because I have taste. My ballot would be placed in the pile of the film that deserves to win, while yours would be placed in the pile for people easily distracted by pretty colors. Got it?
Then, PwC retallies. If this makes a film reach 50%, we’re done. But it will not. So PwC will take the 9th-place stack—the next smallest pile—and redistribute those ballots the same way. Simple enough, right? But! Remember that a chunk of those ballots that are in the 9th-place stack came from the redistribution of the 10th-place stack. So…PwC redistributes the new 9th-place stack based on their third-place votes. Then, if we go to yet another round, the 8th-place stack will be redistributed based on its fourth-place votes.
Yes, seriously. Also, I cannot stress this enough: by hand.
On and on we go, until a film reaches 50% of the 5,777 votes or the PwC auditors crack and jump out a window and plummet to their deaths on California Plaza. The point is that Best Picture could be decided not only by first-place votes, but second- or even third-place votes. And given the fact that Avatar and The Hurt Locker are reputedly in a dead heat…there’s real potential for an upset, most likely of the Inglourious Basterds variety.
Whether or not this is fair depends on how you look at it. On one hand, if, hypothetically, Inglourious Basterds were to win due to ballots being redistributed a billion times, we’d have a situation where Avatar and The Hurt Locker lost, even though they had the most #1 votes. On the other hand, Vanity Fair’s “Little Gold Men” column puts it into perspective: if an upset were to happen, it would be because on all the ballots the upset film picked up through redistribution, it was ranked higher than both Avatar and The Hurt Locker—which means it is actually the more-liked film by a majority of the Academy. Contrast that with the previous system, where votes for a losing film are simply thrown away and we potentially end up with a vote-splitting situation wherein a darkhorse third contender could conceivably win Best Picture—say, Avatar and The Hurt Locker both garner 1,500 votes each, but Inglourious Basterds has 1,501—even though a voter majority of 3,000 didn’t choose it over either of the top films.
But whatever. The real point here is that nobody actually has any fucking idea who’s winning Best Picture. Which at least gives these Oscars some modicum of suspense.
And now, on to the Should Win/Will Wins!
Sources:
- Academy Makes Big Changes in Best Picture Voting (The Wrap)
- Revealed: How Oscar Nominee Ballots Are Counted (The Wrap)
- Academy Will Use a New Method to Tabulate Best Picture Ballots (Los Angeles Times)
- Notes on the Town: Voter Confusion Clouds Oscar Race ("Notes on a Season", Los Angeles Times)
- And the Oscar Goes To (The New Yorker)
- Preferential Voting: Good for the Oscars, Good for Democracy ("Little Gold Men", Vanity Fair)
And some hilarious--but also informative--take-downs of this mess from the good people at Movieline:
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