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Seemingly Arcane New Oscar Rules Could Change EverythingBy Katey Rich: 2009-09-01 06:55:35
So you could conceivably be a rabid Oscar follower and have never noticed, nor cared, that the voting process for nominees is complicated, circuitous and nearly impossible to understand. Really, I can't blame you. And if you're that same kind of rule-averse follower, you probably have no interest in the latest voting change, which will adapt that same preferential ballot and use it to pick the 10 Best Picture nominees, meaning the category will not only have more nominees than ever, but may have a completely transformed set of contenders.If you're interested in the nitty gritty details, the awards mavens at Awards Daily have an excellent explanation. Basically, in the old days, everyone in the Academy got to vote on Best Picture, but they could only choose one film. So if you liked Milk and would have loved to see it win Best Picture, but really really loved Slumdog Millionaire more, only your vote for Slumdog would go through. Under the new system, the Academy will pick their favorites of the nominees 1-10, and ballots will be sorted by the #1 ranked film. If 50% of the ballots rank the same film as #1 (possible in year's like when Schindler's List or Titanic won, not so much for No Country for Old Men or good ol' Crash), that film wins. But if there's not a 50% plurality, they then remove the film with the fewest #1 ranks, then take the #2 films on all those ballots and add them to the respective movie's piles. So, say you were voting last year, and really just thought that Frost/Nixon was the Best Picture among the nominees. You might not have been alone among your peers, but the group of you picking it as #1 on your ballots might have been the smallest; so when it became clear that Frost/Nixon had the fewest votes, all your #2 picks-- be they Slumdog or The Reader or Milk-- would be tossed in those movie's piles as if they were #1's. Eventually a film will have more than 50% of the ballots, even if it didn't necessarily have more #1 votes in the first place. Yes, this conceivably means that a film that no one really loves, but everyone kinda likes, might win. But in years where there's a runaway favorite, like Slumdog, things will stay the same; in years where things are closer, something weirder and less widely adored, like There Will Be Blood, could pull out a win. And in suspected cases of voting against something, the homophobes could have ranked Brokeback Mountain at #10, and it wouldn't have made any difference. It's too soon to tell just how this will affect which film makes it through the scrum to win. But it's going to make it way, way harder for nuts like me who try to predict it.
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