Oscar Crunches the Numbers

The city of San Francisco introduced preferential (or “instant runoff”) voting to its Board of Supervisors elections last November, and proponents of electoral reform approved. The city’s new system, wrote two pundits, “points American democracy toward the future.”

If so, the Academy Awards are already there. When Oscar nominations are announced Tuesday morning, it will mark the 70th time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has counted nominating ballots using its own variation of the preferential system.

Designed to let voters choose their true favorites without worrying about wasting a vote , the academy’s system asks members to vote for five nominees in order of preference -- with actors tapping actors, directors tapping directors and so on (except for best picture -- all members can weigh in on that).

Preferential voting may put the Oscar nominating process in the vanguard of progressive democracy, but it’s one Byzantine system. Working at one of those celebrated “undisclosed locations,” PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers sort the nominating ballots into stacks based on the first-place choices. Any prospective nominee who gets at least one vote more than one-sixth of the total cast automatically receives a nomination. (Trust me, that formula mathematically guarantees that such nominees will finish among the top five vote-getters.)

Then, starting with the ballots of voters whose first choices received the fewest votes, the remaining ballots are redistributed based on their second choices or, if those choices are no longer in the running (either they’ve already been nominated or they garnered few or no No. 1 votes) their third, fourth or fifth choices. The process is repeated, with new eliminations in each round, until five names emerge.

The system has even more curlicues (for instance, a few categories use committees, or so-called bakeoff presentations, to choose nominees), but the basic idea is that your fifth choice can’t inadvertently hurt your first or even your second choice -- because your vote will go to your No. 5 choice only if your higher choices have already secured a nomination or aren’t in contention at all.

As a result, it’s better to be chosen first on 100 ballots than fourth on 1,000. On few, if any, of those 1,000 will the fourth choice be counted. If films with limited but passionate support (say, “Fahrenheit 9/11”) sneak through Tuesday, that’s why.

It also opens the campaign door -- a studio could spend big bucks targeting the magic number of first-choice votes. And that’s not the only campaign trick. The academy has been shocked, shocked recently by nasty politicking, including the public endorsement in 2003 (of Martin Scorsese and “Gangs of New York”) from former academy head Robert Wise that was really written by a Miramax publicist, and a 2004 DreamWorks ad quoting critics saying Renee Zellweger “will win” for best supporting actress, but Shohreh Aghdashloo “should win.”

In response, the academy has tightened its regulations, occasionally pulling Oscar-show tickets from offending studios and threatening to disqualify offenders from best picture eligibility.

Has it worked? Well, last year’s was the cleanest campaign in a while -- but it’s hard to attribute the tidiness to academy enforcement when a far more probable explanation is that, with “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” the prohibitive favorite, why waste the money?

This Oscar season, master campaigner Harvey Weinstein is on the way out at Miramax, while his company has downsized under pressure from its frugal (except when it comes to severance payments) parent company, Disney. The campaigns have thus far been relatively uneventful: polite “For Your Consideration” trade ads, public screenings, mailings and stars making the talk-show rounds.

Of course, this could change after Adrien Brody and academy President Frank Pierson announce the names of the nominees Tuesday. (Whatever else happens, companies like Warner Bros. will be able to stop spending money to pretend that, say, “Ocean’s Twelve” is a viable best picture candidate.)

And, of course, about 150 people will claim that it’s honor enough to be nominated. They’ll be right: A nomination genuinely signals the approval of your peers. From here on in, though, voting in most categories is open to every academy member, which can skew the results. (With the actors branch far outnumbering any other, actors do very well when they’re nominated for, say, directing -- just ask Kevin Costner and Robert Redford, both of whom handed Scorsese Oscar-night losses.

It also means that judgments will be made by those who aren’t exactly qualified. “Why should I be able to vote for costume design?” composer and songwriter Randy Newman once asked me, while wearing rumpled khakis and a loud Hawaiian shirt. “Look at me.”

On Tuesday, at least, Newman’s taste will matter only when it comes to music. And the nominees are....