(photo from WireImage)
In June AMPAS announced they were doubling the amount of movies from 5 to 10 that would be nominated for Best Picture and yesterday they said how they are changing how the winning film will be selected. Here is how
The Hollywood Reporter broke it down.
Voters will be asked to rank their preference from 1 to 10, with 1 being best.
It’s the same preferential voting system that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses in its nominating process, but it hasn’t been used in best picture voting since 1945, two years after the field was narrowed to five from 10.
The Academy has opted to use the preferential system in the best picture race because it realized that with a field of 10 nominees, a winner could emerge with just slightly more than 580 votes out of the potential voting pool of 5,800 members. The preferential system is designed to measure depth of support, since second- and third-place choices can be just as important as first-place choices.
Under the system, ballots are first separated according to first-place choices. If one film wins a majority among all first-place votes, it’s the winner.
If not, the film with the fewest number of first-place votes is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed according to their second-place rankings. The process continues until one film has picked up a majority of votes.
That makes no sense to me, kind of like having 10 movies vying for the biggest prize in Hollywood and most of the films that have won that statuette in recent years.
