Preferential voting & Momentum war
The 'Final Oscar Voting' starts tomorrow! Which means that the momentum is the most important thing in the world for the contenders, now. Whoever has the flow over the next two weeks is likely to be in a very good position. But being the favorite is not enough. Why? Here comes the preferential voting. What is it about? Here is the perfect explanation that I could find: http://www.thewrap.com/steve-pond-explains-oscars-voting-process-video/ .
The preferential voting basically means that it's not a regular popular vote. You have 9 nominees so you put a number (from 1 - favorite film; to 9 - least favorite) next to each of them on the OSCAR BALLOT:
Then Price Waterhouse piles all the mailed in ballots on top of each other (even if a member votes online, they print them out). Imagine 9 piles of paper sheets, them being the Best Picture ballots. 9 piles of different sizes correspond, obviously, to the number of nominees.
A picture needs 50% + 1 vote, to win the Oscar. This said I mean it needs that number of ballots that have the film marked as the first choice. So e.g. "Philomena" gets 60% No1 votes, it wins right away. But in real life it is virtually impossible to have it resolved right away.
So let's just say picture "A" has 25%, and picture "B" has 20%, and so on, to picture "F", which has 5%. No film reached the minimum benchmark, so the one with the least number 1 votes, is out of the game. What happens to paper pile No9? They check which film is No2 on the lists of each, "pile No9", ballot, and that's the pile where the ballots go to next.
E.G. So let's say on the top of my list there's "Her", but that film is out in the first round, and in second place I have "Captain Phillips" - that's my new No1 film. If that one's out it goes to No3 film, or if that one is already out, the No4 film and so on.
There are 8 piles now. If none of them have 50% + 1 vote, than the process goes on again. If on a ballot a film that is chosen as No2 is out as well as the first one, they look at No3, and so on down the list on the ballot. At some point one of the films will have more than 50%, probably meaning that 2 pictures are left in the end. Also, there are NO ties in this category.
So the film that has the 50% +1 votes in the very end is your Best Picture winner. BUT - it doesn't necessarily mean that it had the most No1 votes in the beginning. I doubt "Argo", last year had too many No1 votes.
Another example: Gravity had 30 % in the beginning, "American Hustle" had 20%. But the latter was more often on No2, 3 and 4 spots, while Gravity, if wasn't No1, dangled on the bottoms of ballots. Which means "Hustle" wins. Again - it's only an example.
So a question comes forth: "Is does a film, that's a favorite for a large group of people, beat a film that's somewhere around a 3 spot for 90% of the Academy? Our Best Picture might be a favorite of only 10% of the people, while the popular choice, which is backed by 30%, falls back during the preferential voting. For some it makes it fair, for others - not.
Why fair? Some say that it gives a chance to the films that don't shine, but it beats out a possibility of a big controversy (yeah, look at Argo, that wasn't very well received).
Why not fair? It is said that it boosts the chances of the relatively mediocre nominees. It is a simplest consensus, leaving us in a "so-so" mood, instead of not knowing if a year is going to be cheerful or a disappointment, come the Big Night.
So what do I think? Let's see the system was here for two years, this is the third time. "The Artist" and "Argo". Well I don't know, neither were my favorites but I must say I wasn't so into any of the "Artist year" films, while I kind of could have thought of a couple other scenarios last year which would satisfy me more.
It sounds really complicated, and it makes it feel even more unpredictable, but the two years we've had it, the most predicted contenders won. So we'll see who catches the last-minute momentum.
Well talking about all of this just asks to do a quick Best Picture prediction. The battle of the last weeks goes by the title "12 Years a Slave vs. Gravity". Questions surface: will there be a Picture/Director split? There haven't been two consecutive ones since the 50s, I think. If there isn't one who takes the "BigBox" (Picture & Director). My first pick for that would be Gravity, because, it has the director slot in a "likely winner" status, which means that McQueen isn't even in a battle there, really, and in the Picture category it is pretty even. That said I will shift things up ahead of Sunday's BURT AWARDS and the same evening's BAFTAs, and put Gravity at the top, which I never did before. Just to see how that looks.
Here it is, the preferentially voted, BEST PICTURE:
1. Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)
2. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
3. American Hustle (David O. Russel)
4. Philomena (Stephen Frears)
5. Her (Spike Jonze)
6. Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee)
7. Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass)
8. Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
9. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
Don't forget to look at the OSCAR RACE leader boar page, which you can enter through the sidebar menu.
Burt Mizaki
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