Oscar Voting: The Best-Picture Ballot Just Got Substantially More Complicated

You probably remember that this year's Best Picture race at the Oscars will involve 10 nominees, not five. But now, we learn that there are more changes on the way, and specifically that voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference.

Could this punish polarizing films? And how do you rank a movie you've never seen? We consider these questions, after the jump ...

 

The idea, unsurprisingly, is to avoid a situation where the Best Picture statue goes to a movie that barely more than 10 percent of voters have any regard for at all. (As The Hollywood Reporter notes, without this system, if 10-percent-plus-one voters loved a movie, while everyone else liked it the least, it could still become Best Picture, beating out a movie that 10-percent-minus-one voters thought was the best movie of the year and everyone else thought was second best.)

The key to the system is that, if the nominee you put first doesn't get many first-place votes, then your first-place vote gets knocked out and your second-place vote becomes the equivalent of a first-place vote. Your ballot stays in the mix even as your first choice is knocked out — which isn't the case in the process they've been using, where you vote for one nominee and that one vote is all that's counted. (That's still the system they'll be using for everything except Best Picture.)

The negative way to interpret the change would be that it could potentially penalize polarizing movies, since breadth of support becomes so important. But the system still relies heavily on first-place votes, so broad support can't entirely make up for a lack of adequately passionate support. (It's not like you can win by being in second place on every ballot, since the lack of first-place votes would knock your film out of contention.)

The positive way to interpret this change is that this voting method produces results that are arguably a little more subtle, and that capture a little more of voters' thoughts, rather than just their top-line preferences. (It's also how the Academy chooses its nominees, apparently.)

But what stands out the most is how preposterous it is to expect people to create an orderedlist that plausibly ranks 10 movies, some of which many voters will not have seen, in order of quality. Because it's one thing to simply not vote for a movie because you didn't see it; it's another thing to be compelled to assign a rank to it and have that ranking count.

And even when you have seen all the films, writing an ordered Top 10 list comparing completely different projects quickly becomes a ridiculous exercise — which is better, The Dark Knight or Slumdog Millionaire?

There's no indication that this new system is likely to produce a different Best Picture winner than we'd have seen otherwise. But there's every reason to suspect that it'll force even more meaningless calculations into the mix.