Thankfully, we have The Wrap’s Steve Pond on the case who understands the Academy Math a lot better than we do. Jeff Wells sent him a query so that he could get behind this whole 5% situation. Here is what Pond wrote back:
“When the ballots are counted for the first time, the accountants will assume that 10 slots are up for grabs. This creates a magic number that will guarantee a nomination. This magic number (you really don’t want me to explain how they get it) is about 9% of the vote.” Wells intervention: 9%? What happened to 5%?
“If you get 20% more than this — which works out to about 11% — you trigger the surplus rule. I’ll use your numbers to illustrate:
“In your example, War Horse gets 33% of the vote. But it only needs 11% to guarantee a nomination. In effect, it only needs one-third of its votes. So every ballot that lists War Horse #1 now counts 1/3 of a vote for War Horse (all it needs to get nominated), and 2/3 for whatever film is listed second.
“If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close gets 29% of the vote, it only needs 38% of each of those votes to be nominated. So its votes count 38% for Extremely Loud, and 62% for whatever’s listed second.
“The Descendants gets 23%, so it only needs 48% of each vote. The other 52% goes to each Descendants voter’s second choice.
“And Moneyball and The Ides of March got what they needed, so their ballots aren’t redistributed.
“One wrinkle: What if the accountants go to a Descendants ballot to allocate 52% of its vote to the second choice, but that second choice is War Horse, which already has more votes than it needs? In that case, the 52% goes to the voter’s third choice, or to the highest-ranked choice that hasn’t already secured a nomination.
“At the end of the first round of your hypothetical count, there will be indeed be four Best Picture nominees. But there will also still be a whole bunch of ballots still in play — all those War Horse ballots, for instance, will still be alive, counting for two-thirds of a vote. And all those 2/3 votes, plus the 62% Extremely Loud votes, plus the 52%Descendants votes, should be enough to bump something else over the 5% threshold after those surplus ballots have been redistributed.”
“There’s also one more round of redistribution that happens, where any movie that got less than 1% of the vote is eliminated and its vote is transferred to the voter’s #2 choice (or, again, the highest-ranked choice that’s still in the running.)
“It’s complicated, and they never really talk about it because it just confuses people. But in practice it will almost always result in between five and 10 nominees.”
Well, thanks Steve but that sort of puts right where we were before – the result could be between five and ten nominees.
We still don’t know how many will get in — one thing it will do is make the contests more interesting. Other than that, I predict frustration all around.