Awards Daily Oscar Ballot — The Final Exam

Rob Y has the final form in place to cap off our 2nd Annual Awards Daily Oscar Ballot simulation. This time around we’re working with the actual slare of nominees the Academy has given us, and we’ll see what can be salvaged rises to the top.

Please remember, we’re not trying to guess what the Academy will do. We’re asking each of you to take this ballot and mark it from your heart. Forget all the talk about buzz and momentum and heat. Ignore the noise about who’s due, who’s loved, and who’s not playing the game as they should. (Unless those factors are really important to you — in which case those feelings qualify as “from the heart.”) Choose the nominees you truly feel deserve to win.

The only relationship we expect to see between the real Oscar ballot and ours is just how much our overall readership profile matches up with the demographic leanings of AMPAS itself. If we’re different, we’ll find out how we differ. If we discover we’re very much the same, well, God help us.

After the cut you’ll find a rough time line for the remaining stage of this experiment, and an interesting suggestion Rob has made about how to announce the final results.

The new ballots have been designed with the actual nominees in place, instead of our own nominees from a month ago, which were a bit off. (If neglecting to nominate The Blind Side can be described as ‘off’.) This gets us in sync with what’s happening among Academy members, and just as they’re approaching tight deadlines, so are we. Here’s our tentative schedule:

• 2/23 — Launch of Ballot (vote buying begins for sell-outs)
• 3/1 — Voting Closes (last chance to pretend your opinion matters)
• 3/2 — Tabulation Completed (Rob unplugs HAL 9000, takes the Red Pill)
• 3/3 — Results Annouced (dancing in the streets, gnashing of teeth, Governor’s Bawl, murder-suicide pacts and other flagellation festivities)

Barring unforeseen glitches or hanky-panky, Rob thinks it would be interesting to release the results on March 3rd in a series of announcements throughout the evening. That sounds like a splendid idea. This will give us time to recognize and discuss each of the winners in their own showcase — and it’s a great way to jack up everybody’s anxiety.

Most intriguing of all, we can announce the Best Picture tallies gradually that night, round by round. It’ll be like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, as we watch the nominees killed off one at a time. What gruesome fun! Adam Shankman, are you listening?

Round 1 (Ten BP Titles)
Shorts, Doc Feature, Animated Feature

Round 2 (Nine BP Titles)
Foreign Language, Costume, Make-Up, Art Direction

Round 3 (Eight BP Titles)
Both Sound Awards, Visual Effects

Round 4 (Seven BP Titles)
Cinematography, Editing, Both Music Awards

Round 5 (Six BP Titles)
Both Writing Awards

Round 6 (Five BP Titles)
Supporting Roles

Round 7 (Four BP Titles)
Actor, Actress

Round 8 (Three BP Titles)
Director

Round 9 (Two BP Titles)
Best Picture Announced

How exciting does that sound? The only thing better would be if we can entice Taylor Lautner to drop by on March 3rd to MC.

So that’s that. Final Fantasy. Have fun, and have at it.