How best picture is decided

Predicting the winners of the Oscars might be the most popular sport in the entertainment industry, but actually selecting a winner is no game for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s a system -- called preferential voting -- that generates yearly complaints from statistician nerds and conspiracy theorists everywhere. And though the academy has used it since 1934 to determine its nominees, this is the first year it will be used to determine the best picture winner, which is why the method is taking center stage again and why so many people are scratching their heads trying to understand the process.

So, even with the numerous explanations of the system floating around out there, we know that a refresher course right before the big event couldn’t hurt.

To start with, there are 10 lines on the ballot on which voters are asked to make their picks in descending order. No voter has to fill in all 10 slots -- and many are saying they didn’t -- as long as their choices are listed in order of preference for best film.The ballots are then put into piles according to their top pick. If any one of those ballot stacks for a particular film tallies up 50.1% of the vote from the get-go, voting is over, and we have a winner. But with as tight a race as this year’s seems to be, that’s not very likely to happen.

The next step is to take the ballots in the smallest stack, i.e., the film in last place, and redistribute them according to their second choice film -- thereby eliminating that last-place film from the race. Once those ballots have landed in their new piles, the votes are counted again to see if there’s a 50.1% winner. If not, the smallest stack is again redestributed to the next film down, and so on until there’s a film with the majority of votes.

The film that earns the 2010 best picture Oscar will almost assuredly take home the trophy without having earned a majority of No. 1 votes.

It’s the most efficient and fair way to create both the nomination lists and to pick a winner, says the academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis. “The preferential system is good at discerning what the electorate would like to see [nominated] as a slate of five candidates or 10 or whatever,” Davis says. It also eliminates the possibility of any person being able to vote “against” a film by ranking it extremely low, Davis adds.

When the ballots are returned to PricewaterhouseCoopers, longtime partners Rick Rosas and Brad Oltmanns begin their super-secret process of tabulating the votes.

“We do the hand tabulations for both the nominations as well as for the finals themselves,” Rosas says. “We are sequestered in an undisclosed location, where we count every last ballot by hand to ensure absolute accuracy.”

Above all, Davis says, the academy is focused on protecting the fairness of the process and keeping the attention on the nominees as a group up until Sunday. That’s why the margins with which the films win are always kept under wraps.

“It’s a huge, huge accomplishment to achieve a nomination out of however many hundreds of pictures are made in a given year. If we gave the totals, somebody in each category would be last and somehow people would make that a disgrace rather than the huge honor that it is,” Davis says.

calendar@latimes.com