Is Betting On Box Office Good For Films? 
Marvel Still Looking For Captain America 
'Sopranos' Creator To Film Rock Drama 
LIVE-SNARKING THE 82ND OSCARS... 
'ALICE' IS A MONSTER! $116.3M Blows Past … 
Oscar Not-So-Thriller: Diller Mogul Picnic 
'Precious' Sweeps 25th Indie Spirit Awards 
Howard Stern Won't Be Next 'Idol' Judge 
Justin Theroux Readying 'Zoolander 2' For … 
Mickey Rourke Wooed For Two Big Roles, … 
CBS Reups Les Moonves Through 2015 
EXCLUSIVE: Who Will Be Captain America? 
Matt Damon To Star In New RFK Biopic 
Claire Danes Leaves ICM For WME; Also, ICM's … 
EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Lopez And Sony Music … 
Several media outlets are reporting that the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is changing its Best Picture voting rules now that 10 films will be nominated for the top award. This fall, an announcement will go out to the membership about how, on the final ballot, Oscar voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference, then the same complicated preferential system used to tally Best Picture nominees will be used to determine one winner. As a result, a film could be the first choice of the largest number of voters, but still not win Best Picture. Instead, it could be pushed out by another movie that got fewer No. 1 votes but more No. 2's and No. 3's. This is to ensure that a Best Picture can't win with less than one-fifth of the vote. But it's fucked. It also favors the major Hollywood studios, around whom the change allowing 10 Best Picture nominees was meant to help -- and, in turn, the sinking Oscar broadcast ratings. 
AMPAS executive director Bruce Davis revealed the news today to other media outlets but not DHD. (Since I don't agree with this 10 Best Picture change, and I can't like the usual Academy bullshit, and I won't underestimate what an overpaid horse's ass Davis truly is, I was shut out. But I'll keep expressing my independent opinion all the same...) This 10 Best Picture nominees idea was newly appointed AMPAS president Tom Sherak's when he was chairman of AMPAS' Awards Review Committee, and now everyone can see that voting for the films on the final ballot won't express the will of the Oscar voters. This makes me sick, especially since the entire Academy Award process is already so lacking in integrity. Nor am I alone: as one top movie producer emailed me just now, "First, Tom Sherak as president. Now this new voting method. OMG. Oscar is drowning, and Tom is the lifeguard on duty? Yikes."
AWARDSGATE! What Hath Sherak Wrought? New System For Best Picture Voting Won't Express Will Of Oscar Voters
Comments (28)
|
Post a Comment
Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, don't get your facts wrong, and don't bore me.
News/Opinion Poll
Loading ...Box Office Poll
Loading ...
First Ganis sells the Academy down the river to get nominations for his mediocre filmmaker friends, and now this. Let’s scrap the Academy, and back the last film award show with integrity. The Hollywood Foreign Press.
The awards should once again be a classy, respectful, meaningful closed room dinner event for people in the industry. Oh, wait, that’s impossible. There’s money involved.
I am going to shut my eyes, plug my ears, say “la la la” over and over and pretend that I live in a world where the only movies that exist are the ones they show on TCM.
Because, you know, the whole facing up to the reality that the dream factory as currently defined is a fetid swamp of simmering awfulness might be too much for my fragile little mind to handle.
If 20% of the Academy lists a movie as their first choice, but nobody else lists it in their top 3, while another movie is listed by 19% as top choice, but 80% list it in their top 3 — which film, in your opinion, reflects “the will of the Oscar voters”? I’d say it was the second. And I’d say that Sherak and the board don’t deserve the contempt and bile you poured out on them for this.
…if only DARK KNIGHT were this year.
Easy fix, fellow members. Keep those (studio) clunkers that wouldn’t have made the top 5 under the old rules, out of your top 5 choices.
I have sat on critics’ award-voting panels and watched second, third, and even fourth choices creep to number one when, exactly as Nikki describes, plurality negates majority. On second thought, this change perfectly reflects the contortions studios institute in order to ensure the triumph of mediocracy.
The fun part is going to see how Tom Sherak explains this convoluted voting system on the Oscarcast (unless he relegates it to the end credit crawl). Please, let them have Robin Williams do it!
This illustrates one of the key problems with Hollywood.
There are too many complications for internal “political” reasons that have little or nothing to do with the goal of the project at hand.
I don’t really have a problem with this change. Let’s say there’s a film that’s loved by 15% of the Academy but despised by the other 85%. And there’s another film that’s loved by 13% of the academy, liked by another 50%, and despised by another 37%. Which film’s victory would better represent the will of the Academy, the one that the majority hated?
It’s run off voting, nothing sinister. In political elections this allows smaller party candidates to garner more support, especially in a field with a high number of candidates. With expanding the race to 10, no film will have a dominate number in the first place votes. By doing a run-off system you’re gonna even the playing field for smaller films and show a more accurate representation of the Academies pick with a bigger field to choose from.
I’m a fan of the run off system for political elections, and apparently, the Oscars.
AMPAS, meet Irony…
“All I want out of life is a 30 share and a 20 rating.” Etc, etc, etc.
(Network, by Chayefsky, nominated for 10 Oscars, won 4)
And re this: “…especially since the entire Academy Award process is already so lacking in integrity.” Nikki, that’s being entirely too kind. Perhaps we need to “get mad as hell…”
Uh, yeah — and this season of Entourage is the best.
What a bunch of bullshit. If mainstream Hollywood crap weasles its way into the best picture category and, worse yet, nabs an Oscar, I’ll never take the Academy Awards seriously again. I totally feel your pain, and feel like 10 nominees really makes the award feel less precious and coveted.
One: if every critic in the nation and a few of the big critic’s awards are expected to come up with the top ten movies of the year what exactly is so wrong with the Academy doing the same thing?
Two: they’re going to use the same type of runoff system that many municipalities use to choose their mayor and city council. It’s called runoff voting and is INCREDIBLY popular with voters nationwide. Are you going to blast those as being “bullshit” as well because it’s the same system? It seems to me your indignation is simply exists to serve your own purpose.
Three: how can you POSSIBLY call yours an “independent” opinion when all you do is promote whatever your own agenda with each and every post? That’s the very purpose of a blog! Independent? Please!
Okay, as an AMPAS member who was cool with Sherak but not so cool with the 10 Best Picture nomination idea I have to say that this new methodology for final ballot Best Picture tabulating is complete bullshit.
Now we all know that the Oscars very rarely represent real quality in filmmaking and go to the ‘best’ pictures, performances, directors etc., even less frequently (but hey, I get free screeners), but this is just silly and is nothing more than an idiotic way to try and pump up the Oscar ceremony TV ratings for a show that hasn’t been entertaining in about 20 years.
I was ashamed of the organization a few years ago when they gave Roman Polanski a standing ovation for “The Pianist” and also when they sat on their hands for Elia Kazan; now I’m just embarrassed by it.
Mind you I’ll still stay a member because — well I get free screeners…
Well, this sound familiar … like, how about Hollywood bookkeeping?
I could use an explanation as to why exactly an ordered choice electoral system benefits large studios. Is it necessarily the case that it benefits studios? Is it inconceivable, for example, that a smart independent movie might not get enough second place votes to put it over the top? If so, why? I thought actors were the largest bloc of votes to begin with. Don’t many of them have an openness to independent films? I’m genuinely curious, since I’m a political scientist and have next to no knowledge about the industry as a whole.
Again, the most disturbing aspect of any AMPAS news, is that a very small number of people – who do not represent the Academy proportionally – have decided to redefine the meaning of an Award developed over 7 decades.
If the Academy Membership as a whole were polled – and thankfully a majority are still people who have vocations, unlike these ringleaders – I do not believe this nonsense would be going on. That is why they never were. There is no member forum on the AMPAS website; there has never been any attempt to float this idea, to discuss whether or not is was a devaluation of a currency developed by members(who pay dues)through the years. It was a crass and sneaky change, orchestrated by a warped sampling of the membership.
I think people are missing a few salient points here.
1. Given that there are five Best Director nominees and not 10, you’re still looking at a de facto Top 5 Best Picture finalist lineup.
2. This will give more weight to the precursor awards and critics lists. If anything, Oscar likes to vote for the films that are perceived to be “winners”. Certainly the No Country and Slumdog sweeps through the precursors made the final BP result a foregone conclusion. I suspect that this is how its going to go this year as well (especially in such a weak year)
3. In the absence of a scenario where a BP winner wasn’t even nominated for Best Director (hasn’t happened in 20 years I might add), or a BP winner only wins one or two technical awards, what are we fretting about again?
Personally, I think the 10 BP nominee idea is still a bad idea, but that hardly means Transformers 2 is going to be the winner.
Its official. The Oscars are totally meaningless. 10 nominations and a voting system that’s ass backwards. Another cynical attempt at Hollywood to stay relevant within the pop cultural atmosphere. Pathetic.
Nikki, it’s simple voting theory. While the whole idea is that there’s no “right” way to do it, mathematicians would generally agree that the new way is better than the old way. Now a bunch of out-of-touch a-holes can’t band together and force a win for an unpopular film. There are 5,829 voters in the Academy, right? That means under the old system, it could only take 583 votes for a film to win Best Picture — even if the other 5,246 members hated it. You’re telling me that system is more fair than the new one?
I wish we did presidential, senatorial and congressional elections this way.
This is how the Emmy voting is done: by ranking the nominees in order of preference.
The unfortunate fact about this system is, should there be collusion among a group of voters, they can control the ranking by simply making their *least* favorite nominee 1st, 2nd, 3rd…and make their top favorites rank in the bottom. It’s all math.
I know of a group of Emmy voters who did exactly this to make sure the favorite nominee of one group didn’t trump the favorite nominee of another group. (Before anyone gets excited, the voting was on a Student Emmy, and it was years ago.)
The first group thought one nominee should win, with another nominee coming in second. The second group thought just the opposite, reversing the #1 and #2 positions. So by Group Two ranking the nominee they really believed was #2-worthy at the bottom of the bunch, with Group One being honest about who they thought should be #2, the math changed and Group Two “fixed” the winner.
Actually, something similar happened on the very first season of Dancing with the Stars, where, had the judges been math-savvy, they could have manipulated who won.
Math: You gotta love it.
Nikki, I love your blog. Not only are you articulate and fearless, but your commenters have an IQ above 36. My blog? Not so much.
I’m glad Hollywood is scared of you, they are all full of shit. I talked to one of my neighbors 2 years ago and asked him if he’d seen any of the Oscar nommed flicks and he said no. I asked him what films he thought should be nominated and when he told me, I fainted straight away.
This would have been a good idea to prevent “gaming” the system, if only they didn’t tell anyone about it! Maybe a mathmatician will have to figure out a new way to count if a popular picture is high ranking in the #1 spot as well as the #10 spot.
Er, it’d be nice if Nikki would go a step further than saying “it’s fucked” and actually explain, you know, why. As many commenters have pointed out, it’s quite easy to construct very realistic scenarios where the old system fails to express what any reasonable person would call “the will of the voters,” and where the new system would. To say that this system fails to do so is simply false.
It’s fine to have an opinion, Nikki. If you don’t like the new system, then explain why in simple, logical terms. But just panning it, and baselessly declaring that it demonstrates some kind of miscarriage of democracy is unbelievably silly. State your opinion, then explain and defend it. Don’t give us this “it’s fucked” crap. Force of language does not replace coherency of argument.
@Michael I think you’re off by one.
With 10 pictures in the running, and using the old voting method, a picture could win with 584 votes out of 5929 (vs 583). Nine movies could receive 583 votes, with one movie getting 582 out of the 5929 member votes. This would create a nine-way tie for first, which would likely cause concern.
if only Wall-e were this year…The best motion picture of 2008.