In what many have seen as a surprising move, the Oscars have made yet more changes to the Best Picture Oscar category, changing the winner from simply being whichever movie gets the most votes to a preferential system where voters will be asked to rank all the nominees in order of preference.
It comes only a couple of months after the Academy Of Motion Arts and Sciences doubled the amount of Best Picture nominees from five to 10.
How the new system will work in practice is that after the 5,800 people who vote for the Oscars have ranked the 10 Best Picture nominess from first choice to last, initially everybody’s top film is counted, however if no movie gets more than 50% of the vote, the movie with the fewest votes in eliminated, and the second choice of the ballots for that film are then counted until one film emerges that has more than 50% of the votes.
The Academy says that, “With 10 nominees, the preferential system is one that best allows the collective judgment of all voting members to be most accurately represented.” To be honest they’re probably right, as even with only five nominees there has in the past been criticism that two great movies have split the vote, allowing a third lesser movie to come through and win (a charge often levelled at Chariots Of Fire). This woud be more likely with 10 nominees, as technically in a first past the post system, a film could score as few as 11% of the vote and win, whereas this system should actually get to the film that most voters generally liked the most. As with the movie from five to 10 nominees, it may also allow big studio films to get a look in.