As you may know, this year’s Best Picture category at the Oscars is different in a couple of ways. There are ten nominees, and voters rank them all rather than vote for their single favorite. Will this set up a standoff between Avatar and The Hurt Locker on polarization vs. consensus? From the New Yorker:
Members–there are around fifty-eight hundred of them–are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.
This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus. Now here’s why it may also favor The Hurt Locker. A lot of people like Avatar, obviously, but a lot don’t–too cold, too formulaic, too computerized, too derivative. (Remember Dances with Wolves? Jurassic Park? Everything by Hayao Miyazaki?) Avatar is polarizing. So is James Cameron. He may have fattened the bank accounts of a sizable bloc of Academy members–some three thousand people drew Avatar paychecks–but that doesn’t mean that they all long to recrown him king of the world. (As he has admitted, his people skills aren’t the best.) These factors could push Avatar toward the bottom of many a ranked-choice ballot.
I’d love to see the vote tallied onstage at the actual awards ceremony (with appropriate computer graphics)–sudden death lightning round!–but I guess that’s just the numbers (and game show) geek in me. For a producer it might not be so fun to watch one’s movie be numerically verified as the last among otherwise “equal” losers, er, non-winners.
By the way, so far I’ve seen only three of the ten Best Picture nominees: Avatar, An Education, and Up. Which have you seen, and what are your picks (or rankings)?