Final voting has begun for the Oscars with just 9 days until the big night. Preferential balloting is such that we can dream of crazy outcomes on the big night even though it's fairly clear that 1917 is in the lead amongst the 9 Best Picture contenders. (Have you voted on our "who should win polls yet?If not do so on each Oscar chart) Only Parasite and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood are well poised to spoil the war film's party if preferential balloting is kind to them.
For those who don't know how preferential balloting works it's a complicated math system which begins rather simply by counting #1 votes until one of the contenders has reached 50.1% of the votes. Since that rarely happens on first pass, #2 votes become important... but only from the ballots that have been discarded by whichever film came in last on the most recent round. It's a process of elimination whereby the least loved pictures votes are continually reallocated to that movie's biggest fan's next preference until one movie eventually gets half of the voters on its side...
So theoretically -- if the consensus is correct that 1917, Parasite, and Hollywood are way out front and they all get a substantial portion of #1 votes -- what's really going to matter is how high up those three films are on the ballots of the people who loved Ford V Ferrari, Marriage Story, Joker, The Irishman, and Little Women.
If the voting is especially competitive, every ranking will end up mattering (to an extent). If the voting isn't particularly tense and the three frontrunners end up with a huge percentage of #1 votes on the first round then it's probably not ever going to matter what's far down on anyone's ballots since one film will amass 50% quickly.
We didn't poll Team Experience for a mock preferential ballot but it's fairly obvious from the Team Experience Awards that Parasite would have won on a first round so no 2nd place titles would have factored in. But when you have a group as large as the Academy second place votes are going to matter a lot.
My ballot if I had one...
- Parasite
- Marriage Story
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
- Little Women
- 1917
- Ford V Ferrari
- The Irishman
- Jojo Rabbit
- Joker
If global box office had a ranked ballot ;)
- Joker
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
- Ford V Ferrari
- 1917
- Parasite
- Little Women
- Jojo Rabbit
Other rankings can be found on the Best Picture Chart