Sunday Calendar; Calendar Desk
THE 83rd ACADEMY AWARDS; Making it all count; The
protocol is well-established. And it all leads to the accountants.
Steven Zeitchik
27 February 2011
How does the nomination and voting process for
the Oscars work?
Regular Oscars are presented for individual or
collective achievements in about two dozen categories. Members from each branch
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences vote to determine the
nominees in their respective categories -- actors nominate actors, for example,
while film editors nominate film editors, each member selecting up to five
nominees. For the animated feature film and foreign-language film categories,
multi-branch screening committees vote on the nominees.
All 5,755 voting members are eligible to choose
their top 10 best picture nominees.
Once the nominations are made, all voting members
can cast ballots for winners in all categories, although in five categories --
animated short film, live-action short film, documentary feature, documentary
short subject and foreign-language film -- members must attest that they have
seen all of the nominated films in those categories.
Most categories have five nominees, but for best
picture, which has 10, there's a preferential voting system. For this, voters
are asked to rank their best-picture choices from 1 to 10 (though they are not
required to complete the ballot in full). Then the ballots are gathered and
separated into piles according to voters' first choices. Each movie gets its
own pile -- the film that appears most frequently as a first-place choice will
have the largest stack, the movie with the next-most first-place votes will
have the second-largest, and so forth. Then each stack is counted.
If one film has more than 50% of the votes on the
first round (unlikely), it is 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 and redistribute those ballots to the remaining
piles according to their second-choice movies.
The tally then begins again: If a film now has
passed 50% of the ballots, it wins. If it doesn't, the tabulators go to the
smallest stack remaining, 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.
Tabulations are done by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Only two partners of the accounting firm will know the results before the
envelopes are opened on stage.
--
steve.zeitchik@latimes.com
--
8.75" x 6.25": Width and height of the
new Oscar envelope designed by Marc Friedland.
