Count Dooku

Entertainment Weekly has set out to explain the complicated process by which the 10 Best Picture nominees are decided.

Here's a link to that: http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/01/2...-poll-results/

The process is so complicated that I couldn't summarize it. And the EW article is too long to post in its entirety. Here's a bit of the process:

[Up to] 5755 Academy members cast ballots listing ten films in their order of preference. The ballots are sorted according to the voter's choice for #1 film.
Any movie that is not at least one voter's #1 choice is completely eliminated from the voting process, no matter how often it is listed on ballots as choice 2-10.
[# of ballots cast] divided by 11 equals a "magic number". If a film has more #1 votes than the magic number, it gets a slot as a Best Picture Nominee.

Then things start getting more complicated.
Suppose a voter chose The Social Network as the #1 film and many other voters agreed and TSN far surpassed the magic number.
Then that voter's #2 pick (perhaps Winter's Bone) is given weight and added to all #1 votes for WB.
Why include all this extra math? It assures Academy members that should they pick an extremely popular film, their vote won’t be wasted.
“You are essentially casting one vote,” explains Academy executive director Bruce Davis, “and the system gives your vote to the picture that most needs it.”

The process continues with the #2 picks being elevated on ballots where the #1 pick lacks support to get to the final ten nominees.



I was hoping someone who really understands statistics could explain why this is a better system than assigning values to each pick [10 points for #1, 9 points for #2, etc] and just totaling up the points.

PopcornTreeCt

It's amazing that they get 10 films nominated that way if every film nominated has to be someone's #1. Which means that somebody out there thinks The Kids Are Alright is the best film of the year. Weird.

Count Dooku

bluetoast

Okay I think I get it. First, if you hit the magic number, you're in, end of story for that (more on my assumptions on this magic number below).

Next, the important thing to remember is that everybody gets 1 vote for a movie to be nominated for BP. But, that "1" can be split up depending on how popular a choice can be.

Now if a movie hits the magic number and exceeds it by 20%, then they have to split that vote. My assumption on why it's 20%

Now it's time to move down to determine what else will get in. Everything that has 1% of the vote is eliminated. The vote is divided up and redistributed between the person's #1 pick and that same person's #2 pick. Since the #1 pick is already guaranteed, it does not lose any "votes" and the person's #2 pick still gets some recognition. Now if the #2 pick is nominated/eliminated, you go down the list until you hit a movie that is still eligible.

Reason for the distribution:

Okay say that out of a pool of 2000 votes, 3 movies hit the magic number and two movies hit it and exceeded it by 20% exactly. That gives us 52.72% of the votes accounted for.

Now what about the remaining 5 movies, and the remaining 47.27% of the vote (945 votes left)?

We could just go down the rest of the #1s and add them up, but that is only 945 amount of votes, and they did not hit the magic number. Why should we allow 47% percentage of the votes to determine the bottom 50% of the movies? That is unfair to the movies and voters that got the top 5 picks, and it would defeat the purpose of choosing your top ten. That means that people who voted for the top few movies had their vote count for 50/52, around 0.96 votes, and 50/47 for the people who voted for the bottom half. That's 1.06 votes.

But in reality...
This is a really simple example where movies get exactly 20%. But a movie can also get WAY over 20%, and thus reduce the voting pool even further, giving the "lower half" even more unbalanced voting power.

So each person's vote needs to have equal power. Having the top half and their respective voters penalizes them to get less than 1 vote (collectively) and the bottom half gets more than one vote for movies that didn't even get as many votes in the first place. Not a fair distribution.

So then we go to the #2s of the top movies, since otherwise what was the point of ranking them? Only for those voters whose movies hit 20% or above (2 movies in our example), do their votes get redistributed. This helps to make the distribution of votes fair, as well as give a chance to the movies that are most likely to get the most votes.


CONCLUSION
This is a vote from the list of all eligible movies and so there is going to be a huge distribution of movies as well as top ten lists. If they just chose everybody's #1 choices, there is no guarantee that each of these will hit that magic number (though it is possible, it is extremely unlikely, but the numbers allow for it to occur). That magic number is set such that a significant amount of votes are cast and it is a representative amount of the Academy that selected the flick (9.09%), and then after that go down the list (and backwards from movies that are too low to get in). In addition the redistribution is necessary to ensure that each vote has relatively equal weight.

As for not doing it by 10/9/8 points for 1/2/3, that would give uneven distribution, so for example, a movie gets more #1 votes than a #2 movie, but that #2 movie also has more #3 points, and beats out #1.

newginafets

What if there are only 2 films ever voted #1? It means only 2 nominees?

Travis McClain

I realize there's a lot to cover here, but it's section (6) that really explains the nuts and bolts of this process. Reading that really cleared it up for me:

In short, that clause applies to "over-achievers." In those cases, rather than have an unnecessarily high number of ballots dedicated to a movie that was already qualified for a slot, their votes are redistributed to help out their second choice which may not have otherwise had as many #1 votes. It makes sense to me knowing that's what's actually going on.

What follows is a tangent in which I try to relate to the system using a voting project of my own. It may be of no used to you and you're welcome to skip it entirely.

Troy Stiffler

I can't quite wrap my head around it. But the current system singles out "the best" and ignores the rest. You're either "the best" in the heads of The Academy, or you're everyone else.

That said, it's 5755 people. I can't imagine that the "not even one vote" happens to any worthy contenders. But then I guess you always hear about the 'snubs' (like Zodiac). Though I'd gamble and say that at least one person wrote in Zodiac as their number one

The ten point system leaves a strong possibility that a movie, who the Academy thinks "hey, that was alright, it's a number three" as the Best Picture. It's either you win, or you don't. They don't hand out silver and bronze awards at the Oscars.

chowderhead

I blame Coopers from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ever since they joined the firm, the math has been out of control!

Count Dooku

This is just the system for how they determine the nominees, not the ultimate winner.

zekeburger1979

Steve Pond of The Wrap explains it here. Maybe that will help.

How Oscar Comes Up[ with it's Nominees: A Demonstration

The winner is simply the movie with the most votes.

wirefan

It's a somewhat ridiculous system... it will get the majority of the list right, but the system allows for oddball choices to sneak in to the bottom 2-3.

Also while the system is supposed to not punish people for making a popular choice (as the 2nd choice can get some of the vote), it also doesn't do anything to prevent people from making oddball choices as if it that movie doesn't get enough votes, the movie gets dropped and the 2nd choice on that ballot kicks in. The problem is you only need a small minority to put a film first (or 2nd) to get it nominated and it could be left off over 85% of the ballots and it wouldn't matter.

With only 5 movies on the nomination list this was a lot more difficult (you would need just under 20%)... now that bar has been lowered to just under 10%. I'd expect some oddball choices to sneak in from time to time.

The other issue is that people tend to put more effort in getting the top 3 or 5 movies right and the rest of the list can be a throwaway for most folks. So you get enough people sticking a random movie in at # 7-10 on their list and as the rounds go by and the first 5 or 6 movies get crossed off, you now have the portion of the list that people probably did not put a lot of time and effort into.

MoviePage

Not anymore. As of last year, when the 10-movie system was introduced into the Best Picture category, the final voting in that category is now weighted as well. The winners in the other categories, however, are still chosen the traditional way -- by the most votes.

Count Dooku

You only get to vote for one film so the voting can't be weighted.

Count Dooku

Thanks for that link. It was exactly the kind of comparison I was interested in seeing.

bluetoast

No love for my backbreaking labor?

MoviePage

Again, as of last year, this isn't the case. The voters rank the films from #1 to #10 on the final ballot for the Best Picture category. This was a major part of the discussion in the Hurt Locker vs. Avatar vs. Inglourious Basterds race last year.

More info:

Count Dooku

Sorry, but I didn't follow some of what you were explaining.

Looking over the information that zekeburger1979 linked to, I found a concrete example of the difference between the two methods.

Using the critics' lists and the 1/2/3 --> 10/9/8 scoring method, True Grit is the #9 movie and Carlos is #10.

Using the Oscar's method, Carlos is the #4 movie and True Grit doesn't make the list at all.

Carlos got ten #1 votes and True Grit got six #1 votes. But True Grit appeared on more lists overall (66) than did Carlos (41).

So, the upshot is that the Oscar math will result in a nomination for a film with a smaller but more passionate pool of voters, and a film with a broader less enthusiastic base of support will be left out.

It seems like this is the exact opposite of the Academy's agenda for expanding the nomination field from five to ten.

Count Dooku

I was wrong. I apologize.

Terrell

Why was it necessary to go to 10 films? Doesn't make sense to have that many films nominated. Five, maybe 6 films is enough. Was this simply politically correct nonsense taking over?

Travis McClain

I think you can make a case for the expansion. When it was just five, you may have had a stronger final list but there was a sense that a lot of people had that the choices were sort of given based on studio politics and whatnot. When I review the 20 Best Picture nominees from last year and this, I see more diversity and, I think, a more holistic microcosm of the year in film. Best Picture is an awfully lofty title given how many movies are released in a year. I'm in agreement with those who look at those two 10-movie lists and start determining which are "top five" and which are "expansion" titles. The movies I think wouldn't have made the top five in previous years I sort of confer a second-class citizenship status. But I still appreciate them being on the list, as they help provide context for the others, and the eventual winner.

For instance, I don't think Up would have made a ballot of five nominees, but I certainly agreed it was one of the ten strongest films of 2009. Knowing that The Hurt Locker won Best Picture helps establish a continuum for me of those ten movies. For the purpose of deciding which film to award the statuette, it's entirely irrelevant. But for the purpose of generating thought and renewed criticism of film, I think it's healthy to have ten movies in contention.

Count Dooku

What do you think "politically correct" means in this context?