Oscars 2023: Best Picture and The Preferential Ballot

The Academy has been using the ranked choice/preferential ballot since 2009. They had used it once before, way back in the day, when they had more than five nominees. It went something like this:

1927/28 — 3
1928/29 — 5
1929/30 — 5
1930/31 — 5
1931/32 — 8
1932/33 — 10
1934 — 12
1935 — 12
1936–1943 — 10
1944–2009 — 5
2009 — 10
2010 — 10
2011 — 9
2012 — 9
2013 — 9
2014 — 8
2015 — 8
2016 — 9
2017 — 9
2018 — 8
2019 — 9
2020 — 8
2021 — 10
2022 — 10

The Oscar ratings decline mostly lines up with their expansion of the Best Picture race, although we know there were many other factors at play that have caused a decline in ratings:

• The rise of superhero movies which emptied out theaters
• The rise of a new golden age of television/streaming.
• The rise of political/activist ideology both in terms of the films and the award shows (audiences tuned them out).
• Political polarization that meant anyone not in agreement with the #resistance would not watch.

Then came COVID…

But let’s just stick with the ballot for now and look at the ratings:

It really doesn’t start its sharp decline until after Trump’s win. Then everything got very political and divisive, which is illustrated here. Regardless of what you think caused the ratings dip, the Best Picture winners did see a major shift over time. They went from “big” movies to niche movies.

It is my belief that the only way to bring the Oscars “back” is to shrink the list back down to five. I think it’s important to draw the line at BEST. If they want to expand the acting categories from five to six nominees, that would allow them to be more “inclusive.” Their top prize, however, should be voted on in a way that reflects a “winner takes all” passion rather than a “negotiated/compromise” win.

Here is the Academy’s video explaining how their voting works:

I argued for many years that the Academy should expand to an even 10 nominees from the method they had in place prior to that. The whole reason they expanded in the first place was because The Dark Knight was left off the Best Picture lineup. Voters went with The Reader instead, which is exactly the kind of period drama Harvey Weinstein was very good at selling to voters. But the problem was even back then it was clear there was a growing disconnect between the public and the Academy. It just wasn’t that pronounced yet. Slumdog Millionaire had ended up winning that year and that was a popular film.

A movie can still win in the first round of voting of the current system, reflecting passion, like Parasite likely did in 2019. But in a year like this one, for instance, there probably isn’t going to be a film that wins on the first round. How we will know is if it wins all of the guilds: PGA, DGA, and SAG. Not that many films have achieved that trifecta in the era of the preferential ballot:

2010 — The King’s Speech
2012 — Argo
2014 — Birdman

And that’s it. So if Everything Everywhere All at Once wins PGA, DGA, and SAG then you have a winner that is likely going to win the first round, over 50%.

The reason the Academy shrank down the Best Picture contenders in 1943 was, I think, due to two primary factors: 1) WW2 and the war effort, and 2) there were fewer movies being made overall. These two things are linked, obviously.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Having five Best Picture contenders and five Best Director contenders meant that movies could be big winners at the Oscars. In the era of the preferential ballot, with the sole exception of Gone With the Wind in 1939, in general the Best Picture prize is kind of an afterthought. The “big” movie never wins big anymore and thus, the Oscars can’t really reflect a moment in time so much as they are a niche industry onto themselves.

Here is how the Best Picture wins have gone since 2000. There were two years with big winners, like Return of the King and Slumdog Millionaire.

If I went back through history, I would find the same pattern playing out: fewer Oscar wins (except Gone With the Wind) during expanded ballot eras. There is only so far a Best Picture contender can go now, and the preferential/ranked choice ballot stops the momentum of big winners that dominate other categories with a “winner takes all” approach.

The upside to this is that you can sometimes get the big sweeps that help build up the Oscars as a formidable institution. It means that a big movie like La La Land wouldn’t necessarily lose to a movie like Moonlight. On the other hand, upsets CAN sometimes still happen with five nominees if there are very strong films that split the vote.

It hasn’t seemed to have happened often in Oscar history but it has happened. That is likely how Chariots of Fire won. The two strongest films heading in were On Golden Pond and Reds. They likely divided the vote just enough to allow Chariots of Fire the tiny edge to pull through a win.

The idea isn’t necessarily to always produce a winner but rather to make Best Picture as exciting and competitive as the other major categories, and lately it hasn’t been. It doesn’t feel like the “Big Prize” anymore because you get a film most voters can live with instead of the film they LOVE.

It also has created a situation where people can hardly remember what movies are nominated in a given year. The movies seem to exist to satisfy publicists and bloggers, maybe critics, and no one else. With five, they reduce it down to the essentials. People will likely remember the nominees and winners more because to get that nomination means more.

The Academy is under enormous pressure now to meet the needs of activists and activism, to right the wrongs of society. But they can’t do that and also be successful at what they do. This is a time of choosing. They could probably rattle along like this for the next five years, then shut it down at the 100 year point. But in my opinion, bringing back five would help bring back some of the heft of the top prize of the night. The problem isn’t having ten nominees. It’s the way they vote for the winner that’s the problem.

When we’re predicting Best Picture this year, we have to think in terms of the preferential ballot. We have to think about what people will pick as number one, but also number two, and number three and even as we tick down their ballot what film gets ranked higher than the others.

The race mostly comes down to the top two films that come in. Figuring out which two films those are and how they place on down the ballot is key. Everything Everywhere All At Once is likely to show up at the top, in the middle and everywhere in between. A movie like TAR, by contrast, is going to hit at number one or probably toward the bottom.

Films I think could do better on a preferential ballot in this order:

The less divisive (they need to be top two):
Everything Everywhere All at Once (I am looking forward to not having to type such a long title next year)
Top Gun: Maverick
The Fabelmans
Avatar: The Way of Water
Elvis

The more divisive (they have to come in with a huge share of the #1 vote):
The Banshees of Inisherin
TAR
Women Talking
All Quiet on the Western Front
Triangle of Sadness

In general, films that do well on a preferential ballot are those that voters feel like pushing to the top of their ballots because either they love the movie or they want to do something good with their vote. By the way, the ranked choice ballot is used with nominations too, which might explain how Andrea Riseborough got in and Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler did not. People pushed Riseborough to the tops of their ballots because they wanted to help her. They didn’t do the same thing for the others because they assumed they were already getting nominated.

Both wanting to “do something good” with your vote and passion are the things that help get a nominee in, but when it comes to a winner, passion doesn’t really help as much unless they can win on the first round.

That’s all I got for today.