Academy to use new voting system for best picture

los angeles times

The Oscars are using a preferential voting system this year to determine the best picture winner.

Whereas all other categories will use the same system used in the past — every voter gets to pick one of the five nominees, and the nominee with the most votes wins — the 10-nominee best-picture category will function differently.

Voters will be asked to rank their best-picture choices from 1 to 10. Then the academy will gather up the ballots and separate them in piles according to voters’ first choices.

If one film has more than 50 percent of the votes on the first round (unlikely), it will be declared the winner.

If it doesn’t, the academy will take the shortest stack — the movie that got the fewest first-place votes — eliminate it from contention, remove its stack from the table and redistribute those voters’ second choices to all the other stacks.

The tally then begins again: If a film now has passed 50 percent of the ballots (still pretty unlikely), it wins. If it doesn’t, the auditors go to the smallest stack left, eliminate that movie, remove that stack, and go down those ballots to voters’ next-highest choice (of a movie that remains in contention, of course), and redistribute the ballots across the piles once again. The process repeats until one stack ends up with a majority.