Other Crap

Academy changes Best Picture voting rules

"With so many nominees next year, it’s feasible that a movie could have won Best Picture with only 11 percent of the vote, which seems crazy. So now, 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."

Scoop's note: I'm not sure who the author of this article is, but I know he was not a math major. It is, of course, still possible for a film to win Best Picture with 11% of the first-place votes. The first-place votes will still be the same as before, but now there will be other votes as well.

In fact, based on the above, it is now possible for a film to win Best Picture with less than SIX percent of the first-place vote, and for a film to lose with 49.999% of the first-place votes. Imagine this scenario: There are 100,000 ballots. 49,999 vote for choice A. 5,556 vote for each of B through G, and 5,555 vote for H through J. All voters list B as their second choice.

If you do the math for that scenario using the system described above, you will see that B will end up winning the Oscar with 5.556% of the vote, even though A got nine times as many first-place votes. (Well, actually 8.999 times as many, to be precise.) By the way, it doesn't matter who the A voters list as their second choice in that scenario, so they could not assure a win by dropping B down to tenth choice.

All of the above is based on supposition that the article has described the system accurately. I have not studied the actual rules of the system. Also, again assuming he has described it correctly (which seems unlikely given his other observations), there seems to be no reason at all why people would be asked to list choices three through ten, since only their second choices can ever enter into the calculation. That doesn't seem logical, although stranger ideas have certainly been conceived in human history. I will look at the precise rules when I get a chance.