Best Picture: The History of the Preferential Ballot

2020 marks the last year the Academy will have a floating number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10. The process is weird enough, and confusing enough, that every so often we like to dig into what exactly that means.

The short version is that the Academy expanded their Best Picture ballot to open it up to a wider variety of the types of films they choose. The upside: films that got really close could still sometimes find a place in the lineup. The downside: it means Best Picture winners aren’t always the number one passionate choice by voters.

But it gets even weirder and wonkier than that. In 2009 and 2010 the Academy had an even 10 nominees. That meant ten nomination slots and ten nominees. That is how the Producers Guild still does it. But in 2011, the Academy stopped requiring ten and reverted back to having voters choose five films. That was because for decades they were used to having an even five. Voters did not think they needed to, nor could they, choose ten. As a compromise, more than five films could still be nominated for Best Picture, depending on how much support they received.

When the lineup shrunk from a hard 10 to between five and 10 nominees, the types of movies greatly shifted. There would be no animated films nominated for Best Picture, for instance, and less “genre” movies.

Next year, they will abandon this compromise system and restore the list to an even 10 nominees, meaning voters have to pick ten.

The reason the Academy expanded their ballot was primarily because of the outcry over the lack of a Best Picture nomination for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which at the time had made such a massive impact on the industry and culture that it was shocking it was not in their top five. The Reader got in instead. Most people thought that The Dark Knight would have been close to getting in. But there is no way of knowing whether it just missed or whether it would not have gotten in with ten nominees. After all, the Dark Knight had both a Producers Guild and a Directors Guild nomination. That means there’s a good chance it would have gotten in. But then again, after the ballot expanded, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo got both of those guild nominations but then no Best Picture nomination. It doesn’t always follow that the movie will be popular with Oscar voters specifically, the main reason for that being the Academy is dominated by actors.

Since I’ve been covering the Oscars before and after the expanded ballot, these are some observations I’ve seen.

• The pressure on the Academy has not been to nominate “genre” movies. That’s because Hollywood kind of moved on without waiting around for the Oscars to catch up. They just decided the Oscars no longer mattered in terms of their bottom line and made the big franchise movies anyway. Audiences watched them anyway. The Oscars mostly stagnated in an entirely different reality.
• “Oscar Island” became an idealized, insulated world that was protected from box office pressure. Movies could be made on a smaller scale to be showcases for actors or filmmakers so that they could then maybe get work in Hollywood. So Chris Terrio can win an Oscar for writing Argo but then his next big jobs are all tentpole movies: Batman v Superman, Justice League, Rise of Skywalker, etc. Likewise, the best bet for Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell is to also join big blockbuster Hollywood. The Oscars aren’t evolving, but they still serve some purpose to those who win them.
• Because the Oscars aren’t really relevant to the broader public anymore, and they are a stepping stone to bigger Hollywood, the pressure on the Academy has not been to “let in” bigger movies and grow THEIR audience. Rather, it’s been to expand the kinds of people who get access to that stepping stone – e.g., marginalized groups like BIPOC and women. That is how progress is measured at the Academy and in the industry. The movies themselves are secondary. The Oscar audience is not really a factor anymore either.
• The expanded ballot, therefore, hasn’t been to modernize or expand Academy’s taste in terms of genre. Movies that are successful with the public don’t need the Oscars. The Oscars can help but they can’t hurt any film’s trajectory. Rotten Tomatoes also has minimal effect on box office or public interest. It can help but it can’t really hurt. In short, you have two different species entirely that have long since parted ways and are probably never coming back together.
• Next year’s expanded ballot MIGHT contain genre movies, but it will all still be in the hands of the tastemakers and critics, which will continue to shape tastes around what concerns them at the moment. The films that do well going forward with an even ten will likely be movies that answer both the call for inclusivity and progress, along with being blockbusters. Perhaps Zhao’s The Eternals, for instance. Every so often a film escapes exile and finds itself in the race regardless of the gatekeepers, like Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody — but that is the exception, not the rule. Leaving at least part of it up to the public is, I have always believed, the best way for the Oscars to thrive.

Here is a brief history:

• Outstanding Picture (1927/28 to 1928/29)
• Outstanding Production (1929/30 to 1940)
• Outstanding Motion Picture (1941 to 1943)
• Best Motion Picture (1944 to 1961)
• Best Picture (1962-present)

The 1st Academy Awards handed out two awards for Best Picture. They split them: Wings won for Outstanding Picture and Sunrise won for Unique and Artistic Picture. Turns out they would predict exactly the problem the Academy is going through right now. The Best Picture awards these days is mostly all about the unique and artistic picture and less about movies all of the public has seen. Outstanding Picture lasted through to 1943, at which time they began calling it simply Best Motion Picture. In 1962 it became Best Picture.

That first Oscars, Wings was one of just three nominees. The next year they had five nominees, including the winner, The Broadway Melody. They had five in 1929/30, 1930/31. But in 1931/32 they expanded their Best Picture slate. They had eight nominees, with Grand Hotel coming out the winner.

In 1932/33 they had 10 nominees. The following year there were 12 nominees, and It Happened One Night was the big winner— a lovely, scandalous pre-Code movie that won every category it was nominated for, i.e., the “Big Five” – Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Actress.

There were again 12 nominees the following year in 1935 when Mutiny on the Bounty won Best Picture and nothing else.

Then we’re back to 10 the following year, in 1936 when The Great Ziegfeld won, 10 the again when The Life of Emile Zola won, and also 10 when You Can’t Take It With You won in 1938.

While it was unusual for any film to sweep the awards back in the early days of the expanded ballot, in 1939 Gone with the Wind did just that, winning eight competitive Oscars and a total of 13 overall against a crowded field that included classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz.

Hitchcock’s Rebecca won in 1940, How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane and the Maltese Falcon in 1941, and two World War II films would win in 1942 and 1943 with Mrs. Miniver and Casablanca. Each of these years had 10 nominee fields.

In 1944, maybe because Hollywood filmmaking had slowed down during the war effort, the Academy shrank their Best Picture nominee list from 10 down to five and they held it there all the way up to 2009.

By having five Best Picture nominees and five Best Director nominees, there is no doubt that directors ruled Best Picture. In fact, you had sweeps and clean sweeps quite often.

Filmsite is one of my favorite references for Best Picture stats and here are the films that have won clean sweeps (every award they’re nominated for):

• 2 for 2: Wings (1927/28)
• 1 for 1: Grand Hotel (1931/32)
• 5 for 5: It Happened One Night (1934)
• 9 for 9: Gigi (1958)
• 9 for 9: The Last Emperor (1987)
• 11 for 11: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

All of the films that have won seven or more Oscars — with the exception of Gone with the Wind — were in the period when there were five nominees for Best Picture (1944-2008):

It seems clear that with more Best Picture contenders the more the nominees are likely to win at least one Oscar. Likewise, more films with many nominations were likely to go home with nothing prior to the preferential ballot, where only three films have done so:

But in the current era of the expanded ballot, Best Picture is not bonded with Best Director. They match about half the time, whereas Screenplay, for whatever reason, always matches except on two ocassions:

2009: The Hurt Locker — Pic, Director, Screenplay+
2010: The King’s Speech — Pic, Director, Screenplay+
2011: The Artist — Pic, Director+
2012: Argo — Pic, Screenplay+
2013: 12 Years a Slave — Pic, Screenplay+
2014: Birdman — Pic, Director, Screenplay+
2015: Spotlight — Pic, Screenplay
2016: Moonlight — Pic, Screenplay+
2017: The Shape of Water — Pic, Director+
2018: Green Book — Pic, Screenplay+
2019: Parasite — Pic, Director, Screenplay+

More often than not, Best Picture wins with just Screenplay and not Director. In the years where the Best Picture winner has both — The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, Birdman, Parasite — the actors were involved. Either they were nominated or they had the SAG support. Parasite is the only one that managed to win Director and Screenplay without acting nominations or wins.

Because there are ten slots next year, there is reason to feel hopeful about a Best Picture lineup that MIGHT be slightly broader than what we’ve been seeing lately. What we will continue to see, however, is less of a need for the film that wins Best Director to also win Best Picture.