How they count the Oscar ballots
Tuesday, March 22, 2022 at 10:05PM Voting for the Oscars is now over. Now comes the waiting period to see the results on Sunday night. Final predictions and the Supporting Actress Smackdown are coming up tomorrow! In the meantime, let's talk preferential balloting. This type of voting has given us some amazing winners (Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland) but it has also given us some absurd ones (Green Book) though we can never know which would have still won on a straight plurality ballot and which would have lost. We've seen a few of these videos over the years explaining this but this is a really good one.
It's also worth noting that the other categories use a straight plurality system. The film/person with the most votes win. This balloting system is only used for Best Picture.
Oscar Trivia, Oscars (21)
Reader Comments (9)
Let's ignore for a moment how adorable Ryan is.
If we look at his game as a microcosm of the actual balloting (which it isn't), it seems like the Dog needs to come out of the gate really strong in Round 1 and collect a large pile of votes from the loser of Round 9 (assuming it makes it that far) to hold CODA off.
On a related note, this video demonstrates why I have never been very persuaded by the arguments that "[Insert film here] will benefit from the preferential ballot." In a ten-wide race, the votes are quite fragmented, as seen here. To win, you'll need:
--A healthy amount of #1 votes, which may or may not be related to a film's ability to be a consensus pick.
--A healthy amount of #2/3/4 votes, and voters' preferences do not always fall in neat, predictable boxes of "I liked this film best, so my second favorite is a similar film."
--A little luck regarding the order in which the films get eliminated-- and if the year is very competitive, slight differences in vote totals could dramatically impact the elimination order.
Putting things more simply: if a film got ranked #2 by every single voter, it'd be eliminated first despite being unanimously well-liked.
So saying that "[Film] will win because of the preferential ballot" implies a level of predictability in a potentially-quite-unpredictable voting system. I'll stick with the precursors, buzz, and gestalt.
The most interesting point to make here is that it basically doesn’t matter how the voters who place Power of the Dog or CODA at #1 rank the rest of their ballot since those two movies will likely be in it until the deciding votes come in. What will the Nightmare Alley voters put at #2? That’s more important than what Power of the Dog voters choose as their #2.
Crazy how CODA wouldn't even make the final 5 in a regular year and now it could win next Sunday.
End the expanded Best Picture era.
What would happen if members refused to rank all the films, maybe listing only 4? In that unlikely scenario, after 5 rounds, there would be a high number of "empty" ballots and no majorty. Would the film with thr most votes win, a vacated award, or would it be a tie?
Peggy Sue - I’m not so sure CODA wouldn’t have made the lineup in a field of 5. I think it’s pretty likely we’d be looking at a 3/5 split between Picture and Director this year with PTA and Hamaguchi both getting nominated for Best Director without their films making the Best Picture lineup. Power of the Dog, Belfast, and West Side Story would be the three films with both nominations, leaving two Best Picture nominees without corresponding Director nods. On paper you could reasonably assume they’d be Dune and King Richard based on their overall tallies, but we’ve seen plenty of movies get a boatload of “below the line” nominations without making the cut for Best Picture in the 5-nominee era, so it’s totally possible CODA would have made it in over Dune. Or maybe over King Richard. We’ll never know for sure.
CODA is happening because the LA journalists got bored and decided they needed new toys.
Edwin - I agree with Peggy Sue that CODA would not have been nominated in the 5-nominee era because it has surged so late. It didn't make the BAFTA 5, for example.
It's almost as if there's a huge bunch of voters who only got round to watching it AFTER the SAG Awards and now they really love it.
It's ironic that it feels like Netflix has been pushing Power of the Dog relentlessly for months because Apple have been pushing just as hard and CODA's been around even longer. It's just that voters have only gradually started to pay more attention to it!
This is still confusing as hell lol. I wish they would go back to five for Best Picture. The expansion of the field has let in some really crapfests. The experiment failed.