How Best Picture Voting Works
Of all of the media awards given, none are as highly coveted as the Academy Award for Best Picture. Winning it means that your film joins a pantheon of some of the greatest movies of all time such as The Godfather (Part I and II), Gone With the Wind, Schindler's List, The Silence of the Lambs, and... some not great movies like Out of Africa, The Broadway Melody, and Shakespeare in Love. However, the actual voting process for the award is something that you might not expect.
One would think that the process wouldn't be too complicated. To start with, everybody in the Academy votes on Best Picture, as opposed to only actors voting for Best Actor, directors voting for Best Director, actresses voting for Best Actress and so on. It's just assumed that the person or movie that wins the award is the one that has the most votes, and that is true for every category... except Best Picture.
So, how does it work, and why is it a little moronic?
It's simple in its complexity. To get a grasp of what it looks like, let's take the eight films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year: Nomadland, The Father, Mank, Judas and the Black Messiah, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Minari, Promising Young Woman, and The Sound of Metal. When voters are given their ballots, instead of everybody voting for the movie they like best for Best Picture, they are told to rank each of the movies from most deserving to least deserving. A film needs 50% of the vote to be declared the winner. If after all of the votes are tallied, no films nominated have that 50%, then the lowest ranked films are removed from contention, and its ballots are redistributed to that voter's second choice.
So, let's say that there are a hundred voters for the sake of simplicity, and let's give each movie a random amount of votes.
Nomadland-30
The Father-20
Mank-15
The Sound of Metal-13
Judas and the Black Messiah-12
Promising Young Woman-5
Chicago Seven-3
Minari-2
Like so.
Now, none of the movies has the required amount of votes to win Best Picture, so the bottom movie, Minari, in this case, would be eliminated from the running, and the two votes it received would go to the individual voter's second choice. Making it look like (and again, this is random)
Nomadland-31
The Father-20
Mank-15
The Sound of Metal-14
Judas and the Black Messiah-12
Promising Young Woman-5
Chicago Seven-3
Then continuing like that. Chicago Seven is now eliminated, and its votes go to the second choice.
Nomadland-31
The Father-22
Mank-15
The Sound of Metal-14
Judas and the Black Messiah-13
Promising Young Woman-5
Nomadland-31
The Father-23
Mank-17
The Sound of Metal-14
Judas and the Black Messiah-15
Nomadland-41
The Father-24
Mank-17
Judas and the Black Messiah-18
Nomadland-51
The Father-28
Judas and the Black Messiah-22
Now we've hit the point where Nomadland has enough votes, and it has now won Best Picture.
As a side note, no other category works this way. Just Best Picture so as to make it the widest consensus. Technically, this means that a movie with the most initial first place votes could still lose Best Picture due to the runoff method. Is this the right way to go about it? Who knows? It does make one wonder about the Best Picture winners since 2009, when the method was implemented. For that matter, what would they look like if this method was the norm since the first ceremony in 1929?
We'll never know, but now you know how things work currently.
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