Every November more than 6,000 voting members from the 17 branches of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences are sent a nominations ballot for the Oscars. On this, they rank their favourite five films in a particular category, from best director to best makeup and hairstyling. After the votes are tallied, the awards are handed out at a glitzy ceremony, being held this year on February 22nd. But how, exactly, are Oscar winners decided? Members of the Academy are all current or retired industry professionals, either put forward by their peers or award nominees themselves. Each can only nominate within their branch: a writer, for example, cannot submit a nomination for best sound editing. PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accountancy firm that is responsible for tallying the votes, uses a method almost identical to Britains proposed “alternative vote” system. All the first-choice ballots for each film are counted, with those above a certain threshold securing a nomination. The lowest-scoring film is then eliminated and its second-choice ballots assigned to the remaining films. The process continues until five films are over the threshold (with the exception of the best- picture category, which can have as many as ten nominees on the shortlist). If a film receives a particularly large number of nominations, so that further votes for it are in effect wasted, a trickle-down process kicks in, and subsequent ballots are redistributed to the next highest choices using a fractional weighting scheme. Once the shortlists are announced in each category, Academy members are sent a second ballot, and simply pick their favourite in each category. In this second round they are allowed to cast votes in categories outside their branch, but they are advised to avoid those where they lack expertise. Some people think there are problems with this process. For one thing, voters can pick films they haven’t even seen. A larger difficulty is that the Academy’s membership is not particularly diverse: a report in 2012 found that around 94% of its members were white, and more than 77% were male.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 22:12:17 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015