In case you haven’t been studying at the Oscar race for Best Picture for the last 16 years as I have, you might not remember why the Academy changed their rules in the first place. It was to cure the problem of so many genre movies with so few Best Picture categories. It came after the avalanche of fury that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, at that time the second highest grossing film of all time, did not make the Best Picture cut, with the Weinstein Co’s The Reader getting in instead. Not only was The Dark Knight hugely popular with regular moviegoers world-wide, 16 critics on Metacritic gave it a perfect score of 100. The Dark Knight represented that elusive gold-plated brass ring Hollywood always dreams about: a billion dollar blockbuster with all the thrills to thrill a mass audience and all the brains and style to earn respect and critical acclaim.
In order to be sure to embrace the next Dark Knight, the Academy expanded its reach for the first time in 60 years, opened Best Picture to an even ten, giving their members ten slots for nominating instead of five. But the voting members chafed against this new change. They didn’t like having to come up with ten. It was too confusing and too stressful to see that many movies. Five was what they’d been used to since the 1940s. Several fascinating things happened in those now lost two years where there were ten and not five. Both years had genre movies like District 9, animated films like Toy Story 3, films directed by women, like The Kids are All Right and Winter’s Bone. Big movies, little movies, a variety of films represented. They were great years for the Best Picture race for those of us “out here.”
But the Academy relented to voter complaints and once again gave voters only five slots to fill out for Best Picture. The Academy, though, has a special method for counting that allows for more than five nominees. With this method, they tested one decade and came up with a variety of numbers for each year. They had one with 6 and with 7 and with 8 and with 9. They never did get a 10. We all went into what I call the “herding cats” method of finding Best Picture assuming it might turn out that way. Since they implemented the plan there has been a solid 9 each time. This year, though, several pundits are toying with the idea that there might be less than 9, maybe like 8 or 7 or even 6, or, gasp, 5.
What would make something like that happen, you might ask? The only thing I can come up with is that if there was a hard consensus around just a few movies and that there weren’t stragglers. The pundits theorize that because there are only a few “Oscar movies” that it’s a “weak year.” Here’s why I don’t agree with them and think it will reflexively slip back to 9 once again. The internet and Oscar publicity has changed everything.
The reason I think there will once again be nine goes back to how I use the ad software on my site – it’s a stupid explanation, I know, but stay with me. In order to get the ads to run as often as possible I push them up to higher than the allotted amount to evenly divide them. They push to extremes because they can. Publicists in this race, critics and advocates push to the extreme so that in a year like this one there might be more diversity in the favorites and less agreement about the hard consensus – that is likely to once again trigger 9 rather than a lesser number.
But I could be completely wrong about this – we’re making it up as we go. There is a surprise element for those of us in the game – most people aren’t paying enough close attention to understand why there are more than 5 anyway. All they’re thinking is: just more movies I haven’t seen, don’t want to see, and will never see, but what is Reese Witherspoon wearing?
Paul Sheehan over at Gold Derby is kind of killing it lately with articles about the Oscars and especially Oscar math. Check out his article here – and see below, the Infograms I made using his data.
Ryan also sent me the link to James Schamus’ guest post at Variety explaining it too.
I enlisted the help of The Wrap’s Steve Pond to help me figure out in what instances they would allow for less than 9. He explained it this way:
You set a magic number (the number of votes, divided by 11, rounded up to the next whole number), and then count up all the first place votes. Any movie with more than the magic number is an automatic nominee. Any movie with 10% more votes than it needs falls under the surplus rule and has a portion of its vote allocated to the #2 choice on that ballot.
Then you take all the movies that got less than 1% of the vote (under the Gold Derby example, any movie with fewer than 54 first place votes), and reallocate those votes to the #2 choice on each ballot, or the top-ranked film that’s still in the running.
In every category except Best Picture, you keep eliminating the lowest-scoring films and redistributing their ballots until you wind up with exactly how many nominees you want. But in Best Pic, you stop after this single round of redistribution. At this point, any movie with more than 5% of the vote (272 votes, using GD’s example) is a nominee. Any movie with less than that is not.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, this will always result in between 5 and 10 nominees. They tested it by going back over 10 years of voting, and doing recounts using the system. It gave them years of 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 nominees. (Never a year of 10.) But for some reason, in the three years it’s actually been used, it has always produced 9. Go figure.
Did you get the part where he said there isn’t a continual counting of rounds for Best Picture only? Yeah, that part!
You won’t be counted unless you have a significant number of #1 votes and preferably in the first round. You want a goodly amount of number ones on first round, say at least 200 or 300, and then pick up some extras on the ballots that triggered the surplus vote. Think about it, though, in a year with a smaller number of really popular films, most of them are likely to trigger the surplus rule. That leads me to think, again, that it will go to 9. Let’s say movies that will hypothetically trigger the surplus vote:
Boyood
Birdman
The Imitation Game
Theory of Everything
Next, you have movies that will get number one votes but may not trigger the surplus.
Selma
Grand Budapest
Gone Girl
Nightcrawler
Whiplash
Then you have those that might get in because they are passionately loved, though too divisive to WIN:
Interstellar
Unbroken
American Sniper
Whatever films on this list pick up 2s and 3s are going to add to their pile, thus ensuring a place. That’s the best way I can see. Unless the majority of the Academy, all 6,000 of them, only go for the core films, which is likely not to happen being that many of the voters are publicists who will vote for their films whether the rest of the Academy likes them or not. Then you have actors and what movie they might ram through – I’m thinking maybe Unbroken since it’s one of their own in the driver’s seat. Actors and that weird group of voters that make up the biggest block – those who have NO CATEGORY — members-at-large, producers, publicists, casting directors.
Using Sheehan’s article, I made an infogram to illustrate the number game where the voters are concerned: