Little Gold Men Peers into the Psyche of AMPAS

On the Little Gold Men site on Vanityfair.com, they have a sideline chart of their predictions for the win. They have Avatar listed as the one most likely to succeed as Best Picture.

Meanwhile, they go into a voting scenario, another one that puts Inglourious Basterds out front. They hope anyway:

Under the previous system, each Academy voter would simply check off his or her favorite film on the best-picture ballot. Under the new system, however, each voter is asked to rank all 10 nominated films in order of preference. So, let’s say you’re a retired sound engineer. When you get your Oscar ballot for best picture, you’ll rank all the nominees, say Avatar No. 1 (you are, after all, a tech nerd and you probably worked on Avatar), The Hurt Locker No. 2, Inglourious Basterds No. 3, and so on, down to An Education, which you didn’t see, so you rank it No. 10. Simple, right? Where preferential voting gets confusing—and interesting—is in how the votes are tallied. Because, unlike in one-vote systems, in preferential voting everyone’s vote is counted. Again and again.

More after the cut.

Round one is simple enough. You create 10 piles, one for each nominated film, and in each pile you put all the ballots that ranked that film No. 1. The piles for The Hurt Locker and Avatar are likely to be large, while the pile for The Blind Side … not so much. Barring ties, one of the 10 piles is the largest (let’s say Avatar got the most No. 1 votes) and one is the smallest (let’s say A Serious Man got the least).

In the second round, the nominee with the smallest pile is eliminated and all the ballots in its pile are redistributed to the nine remaining piles. To follow our experiment, if A Serious Man had the smallest pile, then all the ballots in its pile are re-examined, and the film ranked second on a given A Serious Man ballot gets that ballot placed in its pile. Once all the ballots that ranked A Serious Man have been redistributed, the process is repeated, next eliminating the smallest of the nine remaining piles.

Basically, you wash, rinse, and repeat until one pile contains more than 50 percent of the ballots. According to the Academy, there are 5,777 voting members, so the magic number is 2,889 ballots.

If you’re still with us, great. If not, let’s run a vote! In our hypothetical vote, we’ll rig it so that Inglourious Basterds wins. In the first round, say 1,000 ballots ranked Avatar No. 1, and 1,000 went to The Hurt Locker. For the rest of the field: 700 for Inglourious Basterds, 700 for Up In the Air, 500 for An Education, 500 for Precious, 400 for District 9, 400 for The Blind Side, 300 for Up, and 277 for A Serious Man. That’s 5,777 total ballots from 5,777 voting Academy members.

Okay, so far I’m with this. I can actually visually picture how it might work. But let’s see how they work it out and find the snag.

As round three begins, the totals are:

Avatar: 1,000
The Hurt Locker: 1,000
Inglourious Basterds: 900
Up in the Air: 700
An Education: 500
Precious: 500
District 9: 400
The Blind Side: 400
Up: 377

So this is where they get sloppy, but let’s keep going (and you should really read their whole article which explains the whosits and the whatsits):

To keep it simple, we’ll say that 70 Academy members picked Up in the Air next, and 7 picked District 9. Also, in our quest to give Quentin gold, we’ll give him Up’s original 300 ballots.

The new totals are:

Inglourious Basterds: 1,200
Avatar: 1,000
The Hurt Locker: 1,000
Up in the Air: 777
An Education: 500
Precious: 500
District 9: 407
The Blind Side: 400

So here’s my question. Going from the bottom most likely upwards, let’s say The Blind Side peeps and A Serious Man peeps – what movie is going to be their second and third choice? Are they going to go with Avatar in second or third? Or will they go for the smaller dramas, like An Education? It’s hard to know. They have to order them from best to worst.

They conclude with an interesting observation:

I know what you’re thinking: Enough about the fate of nations—what about Oscar? Sadly for Basterds, this means that for it to beat Avatar and The Hurt Locker, it would have to be the film that more than half the Academy preferred over either of the other two, which at this point in the race seems unlikely. Best picture is a closer contest than you might think—with The Hurt Locker and Avatar in a dead heat, the opinion of even the meekest A Serious Man voter will now count. Those trying to mind-read the Academy must also ask if Precious voters preferred Avatar, if An Education voters preferred The Hurt Locker, and so on. Thus, as Hertzberg points out, if Avatar is more polarizing than The Hurt Locker is, that could put the latter over the top even if the former got more No. 1 votes.

Whoever wins, we are about to get the best sense we’ve ever had of what the Academy really thinks. It won’t be like in 1990 when Goodfellas and The Godfather Part 3 split the Sinatra vote and Dances with Wolves won. That said, whether what the Academy considers to be the best picture of the year really is the best picture of the year is another question.

I know we all keep saying the same thing, but it’s interesting to note anyway that this process will give us a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to go down. Another clue into the process is simply the number of nominations from the various branches. The actors are really going to matter this year, I figure. Still, I feel like Best Picture is still anyone’s game.

Seriously, you look at those counts and you can imagine any scenario taking place.