Our friend Ryan Casselman lays it out simply. What I figure from watching these polls play out is that it really helps to be the number one movie coming in. You want to be one or two. It’s hard to come up from 3rd place but not impossible. Obviously Ryan here is choosing actors so you can probably figure out how it’s going to end up.
I’d propose to make a preferential ballot exercise with the big 8…
Will this 90th anniversary Oscarcast set the record for most standing ovations? I don’t want it to become the Grammys where the audience nearly stands up for everything, but I hope everyone’s on their feet for Eva Marie Saint, 93. And James Ivory & Agnes Varda (both 89) if they win. I’ll take it for granted that Best Actor and Actress, and Director, will get standing O’s, but if they also win, I could see the same reception for Jordan Peele and Roger Deakins.
Yay for seeing Eva Marie Saint, a wonderful actress and alumna of my husband’s alma Mayer BGSU
They would never do this but The Academy should show the results of the voting. It would be interesting to see how close it could be.
What I get from this is:
Though it’s important to be a #2 or #3, really …
… being ahead by quite a bit in Round 1 with #1’s really DOES help, a lot. You get that buffer before each subsequent rounds unfold.
Also, being #2 or #3 isn’t necessarily the big deal … it’s being ahead of your closest competitor in the individual ballots.
That makes it trickier to figure out, honestly (where each film could place in any order on anyone’s ballot).
Both the weighted ballot and the preferential ballot are imperfect for determining superlatives in art. The weighted ballot can theoretically result in everyone getting an equal piece of the pie and the winner having the one that’s slightly larger, meaning that the vast majority of other slices didn’t vote for the winner. The preferential ballot can theoretically result in a winner having a smaller demographic of passionate support (i.e., #1 votes) and ultimately ending up as a bland and safe choice because it appeals to *everyone*.
Appealing to everyone appears to be AMPAS’s goal.
It’ll never happen, but I’ll be in the minority who wishes the Academy went back to just 5 Best Picture nominees. It was good enough for nearly 65 years (from 1944 to 2008), and Best Picture would be in line with how the rest of the 23 of the 24 categories are determined: most votes wins.
If there’s any change I’d want to see in making the Oscars more uniform, it’s that Makeup and Hair deserves to be expanded to 5 nominees. It’s the only category with 3 nominees, and there’s plenty of worthy work to recognize. Why is it still being treated like a second-class citizen?
Yes. For me, Make-Up/Hair should have 5 noms. And combine Sound Editing and Mixing to one category with all nominees listed.
Yes to MUAH getting five nominees.
No to Sound categories combining to one. They’re very different parts of the filmmaking process.
Would it really change what might win though? Is this more a feeling of symmetry rather than actually providing a chance for more vasried m=nominees? (The argument against expanding to 10 possible noms applies to expanding to 5 makeup noms.)
I’d rather see them add more categories for best picture (Best Comedy, Best Horror-Sci Fi/Fantasy etc.) along side the other “genre” categories of Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and Foreign Language In my ideal world all those winners of those categories end up on one ballot for a final Best Picture period. Not demeaning the award but to put it in simpler terms make Best Picture(s) like Best in Show at Westminster Dog Show. Blade Runner might not have won but it would be a fairer competition to give it a shot. As a side benefit you might see the viewership numbers go up.
If the stars were to walk the red carpet with dogs it would be so cute. Imagine a star with a elegant dog like a Suluki or a Afghan Hound. Of course they would have to hire extra people to clean up the accidents.
For me, it’s not symmetry; it’s fairness. Why should one category get treated differently than the others? It’s insulting to tell hair and makeup artists that their valuable contributions aren’t as worthy of 5 nominations, like all of their film colleagues. … From 1984 until 2009, there were usually only 3 Oscar nominations for Visual Effects. Then they were bumped up to 5. Why does Makeup still lag behind? Not every movie uses notable Visual Effects, but surely every movie has Hair and Makeup.
As for expanding the Best Picture field, this happened after ”The Dark Knight” (2008) got 8 Oscar nominations, but was shut out of Best Picture. Ostensibly, the Academy expanded the number of nominees to increase the room for acclaimed genre movies to make the cut. This aimed to increase the public’s interest in the Oscars (since the public’s tastes and the Academy’s have grown further and further apart). In that respect, to me, it’s been a failed experiment. Instead of welcoming more box-office hits to the fold, it’s only opened up more slots for indies. Of the 25 highest-grossing movies in 2017, only 2 of them are Best Picture nominees: ”Dunkirk” (at No. 14); ”Get Out” (at No. 15). And you have to go all the way down to No. 39 for the next one: ”The Post.”
Even the moviegoers seem to be rebelling. In the past, Oscar nominations usually brought a box-office bump to the Best Picture nominees. But I’ve seen industry reports that say there’s been little of that boost this year.
That’s sort of my point that the expansion didn’t really accomplish the goal of allowing more “genre” or “popular” films get in. Animated Feature was created in response to the popularity of Lion King as I recall. Why not use the same philosophy to give other worthy films a shot (even going back to five for the other BP category). Bump the shorts and some others to a streaming beforehand.
If the Oscars are about the “honor” then why bother televising them at all? If the goal is to give exposure to these up and coming film makers does a quick listing of the shorts names and a random list of people in a thank you speech really do that? There is an audience for shorts info and they would likely seek it out in the hour before the prime event over watching a parade of gowns down the Red Carpet, yes? The Oscars need to start making up their mind what they are – artistic honors or an entertaining marketing gimmick. Right now it is like the chess club organizing homecoming and wondering why no one wants to go anymore.
“Animated Feature was created in response to the popularity of Lion King as I recall.”
Actually, it was created as a response to Toy Story and Pixar’s growing success in general. (Which is why it was supremely ironic when Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. lost to Shrek in the very first Animated Feature category ever.)
You are right. I should have done my homework first.
But it needs to have its own passionate support. If a film gets significantly higher #1 votes than the next film, it will most likely win. If the #1 and #2 have similar first round votes—essentially the approximate amount of passionate support—then it falls to the one with broader appeal.
That’s what makes it better, the fact that the winner is most likely to come from the top 3 contenders.
Really, it’s the top 2. I cannot see when there is a sizable sample size of an example of a #3 surging to #1.
They just announced the order of the ceremony:
1. Supporting Actor
2. Makeup & Hair
3. Costume Design
4. Doc Feature
5. Sound Editing
6. Sound Mixing
7. Production Design
8. Foreign Language
9. Supporting Actress
10. Animated Short
11. Animated Feature
12. Visual Effects
13. Film Editing
14. Doc Short
15. Live Action Short
16. Adapted Screenplay
17. Original Screenplay
18. Cinematography
19. Original Score
20. Original Song
21. Director
22. Actor
23. Actress
24. Picture
I’m glad they’re waiting so long for Original Screenplay. I was afraid it would be one of the first and all the suspense of the Best Picture race would pretty much be over at the beginning.
This ballot is exactly how most people see it going! Very interesting maybe Google is full of Oscar voters.
I’m convinced that people who claim to not like the preferential ballot really just don’t understand it. It is by far the best way to determine the winner, a fact I only became increasingly convinced of as I conducted my own BP simulation this year.
People complain that it’s more prone to manipulation and strategizing than the plurality ballot, but literally the exact opposite is true. If it were still a strict plurality ballot and I was a CMBYN fan (you know, just hypothetically) than I could strategize my vote: I know CMBYN doesn’t have a chance of winning, so instead of being honest about what I actually think the most deserving nominee is, I can cast a vote for a movie that has a chance of winning that I at least like (such as TSOW) in order to try to stop a movie I *don’t* like (such as 3BB) from winning. There’s no such strategizing on a preferential ballot: it actively promotes honesty in voting. I can put CMBYN at #1 and rest assured that, no matter if/when that movie is eliminated, my ballot will still end up counting in the final tally. There’s no fear of “wasting” votes.
People say that if you don’t want a movie to win you can just vote it down on your ballot. Well… yes. That’s literally the point. If you don’t want a movie to win, that probably means you didn’t like it, which probably means you’ll rank it lower on your ballot. That’s not manipulation, that’s literally just how ranking works.
People claim that it promotes bland, “safe” winners that everybody “likes” but nobody “loves” — as though the preferential ballot were somehow causing a film initially ranked #6 or #7 to magically jump to the top and win the whole thing. As we’ve seen from countless demonstrations (including the one above), the movie that comes in #1 on the first round almost always still ends up winning; the preferential ballot just makes sure that everyone’s vote is counted, rather than throwing 80% of them away. Only if the initial counting is close can a #2 movie hope to overtake a #1 — and maaaaybe very very rarely a #3 if it’s a crazy close race — but the preferential ballot guarantees that a majority of voters should still be happy with that outcome.
If you don’t like the movies that have won under the preferential ballot, I would argue that’s the fault of the Academy and not the preferential ballot. The voters were likely ranking these movies as #1 even before the round-by-round eliminations started. Let’s not pretend like all the winners during the plurality ballot were always masterpieces, either. There are always going to be winners you like and winners you don’t like, regardless of what method of balloting the Academy uses. At least the current method guarantees that people will be honest with their vote.
And what if two films end up 50/50? Can it happen?
Then the film with more initial #1 votes would win. And if those numbers are tied, then the film with more initial #2 votes would win. Etc.
I do wonder how far they would go, say what if 2 movies were even and then had the same amount of 1-9 votes (probably statistically impossible but still)
I think you answered your own question. The statistical likelihood of that happening is so negligible, I’m not sure there are even contingencies in place to address it.
Such a dumb way to figure out with the BEST PICTURE. Are any other big 8 categories picked liked this
The other categories should be chosen by this method.
But if you come off the bat with a 51% average you take home an oscar. And they don’t release those figures so we’ll never know.
As for the other categories where the races are close would definetly produce more surprises.
50.1% of the vote automatically wins in both systems.
The USA infrequently gets a winner in a presidential election with 50%+ of the vote, and that’s with just two major party nominees. With rare exceptions, I highly doubt that any film gets 50%+ of the vote in Round 1 with 7-8 other nominees in the field.
I totally agree, I like that there is no strategy… The most strategic way to vote is to rank films in the order that you like them.
It may be dumb to you but put it in this perspective. If we had a preferential ballot for president then Clinton would have won. Would it be better for say Darkest Hour (or your least favorite) to win with 1/9th +1 of the votes? Remember most people may be flipping a coin at the end between their #1 and #2. How many people would be upset if their second or third choice won? How many would be unhappy if their 8th or 9th won?
Good point about Clinton. The ballots favor smaller films like Moonlight, Spotlight and even Birdman at the end of the day I think their motive is to see what films are universally liked.
Agreed. Best is always going to be subjective and determined by time/future generations. A “classic” is only something that future generations agree is as good “now” as it was “then.” And many times something that future folk determine is actually good no matter what contemporaries felt.
Agreed thats why I feel Get Out, Call Me By Your Name and you could probably put a couple in the race into the “classic” category. It seems people will talk about them for years to come. I will forever look at horror/thrillers differently now
Something significant just happened: Joyce Eng, who had had The Shape of Water all this time, finally switched to Three Billboards herself… I don’t know, if there was still strong talk of backlash, would she really have done this? Would so many others have done it earlier? I don’t think so. (She could still be wrong, obviously – easily. But it has to be a good sign for Three Billboards, if it means anything. These last minute switches for picture – like when Tom O’Neill switched to Spotlight, or when Sasha switched to Moonlight late on as well, though I’m not sure if her switch was also in the very last days or not – seem to be significant, in general. It’s not the same for the other categories, but when it comes to picture they seem to be good omens.) I guess she was waiting for the Independent Spirit Awards. Perhaps it’s also significant that she didn’t switch to Get Out, instead…
http://www.goldderby.com/awardshows/expert-predictions/oscars-2018/picture/
In other news, I’m switching my official prediction for costume design to Phantom Thread. I’m keeping my Awards Daily entry as Beauty and the Beast, because I don’t have any real upsets predicted otherwise, and it’s a solid stats alternative (as is The Shape of Water), but I don’t want my score for my official predictions to go down because I went for the upset in a category where almost nobody else did. I’d rather get it wrong because I chickened out… I will refer back to this thread later, if need be – I’m not sure how many people are going to see this in time. Hopefully, at least enough to back up that I actually made this switch before the Oscars, if there’s doubt. 🙂 Not that it’s that important, but I like to be able to back up everything I say, even the minor things. I hate being accused of rewriting history.
“I’m switching, please don’t!”
Claudiu, ce fac? – keeping fingers crossed, all the best for tonight. Hopefully some of our predictions are coming true. Thank you so much for all your infos and inputs of the whole OSCAR season. ### – you know it very well. – The winner takes it all … ###
🙂 You’re very welcome! And, again, I still very much think Beauty and the Beast is a possibility in costume design – and still quite probably value at the odds it had when I made my bet (and when you made yours).
Did you catch that Keith Simanton switched to Get Out and Susan Wlos. switched to Three Billboards from Shape as well?
I’ve tracked the switches of the Gold derby and Gurus of Gold pundits. Gold Derby is now down to 7 for Shape. The same as for Get Out. Gurus was tied 50/50 between Shape and Billboards until Susan W. switched. These people are predicting and most treat it seriously for bragging rights. The only question is are they getting on the ground from the voters sentiment or is this a herding mentality? After all there should have been SOME sentiment on the ground last year but only a small handful picked Moonlight. (Again nearly all of them had it second). This is where your stats model is more objective as it doesn’t respond to group think.
Yeah, I did think Susan Wloszczyna might have been one of those that had Shape before, when I was going through the experts at Gold Derby, but I wasn’t sure so I didn’t mention her. 🙂 It was clear it wasn’t just Joyce Eng that had switched from the overall numbers – 15-7-7-1 now, whereas it was a lot more even between Shape and Billboards before.
“The only question is are they getting on the ground from the voters sentiment or is this a herding mentality?”
If it was a herd mentality, I think they’d have done it earlier – it’s hard to resist peer pressure for too long (and there was some time between BAFTA and now), if you actually feel it in the first place. (Which, if we’re assuming it could be herd mentality, it would mean they are.)
“This is where your stats model is more objective as it doesn’t respond to group think.”
Yup. That’s one of the many things I like about it too. 🙂 I’m all about objectivity, so I’m naturally drawn to the system least susceptible to subjectivity…
“After all there should have been SOME sentiment on the ground last year but only a small handful picked Moonlight.”
I think are a number of things that might be true here:
1. They didn’t yet have a Moonlight-level event behind them then, so they were overconfident in their reading of the stats and “buzz” and so on – even though so many of them had also just gotten The Revenant wrong. And, of course, La La Land hadn’t lost BAFTA and the Globe, compared to Shape. And it had 14 nominations instead of 13, and had swept the Globes. And Moonlight hadn’t won SAG. By their nature, they tend to be very dismissive of snubs as super-important clues (which is why they’ve dismissed the SAG stat so often, and are only now beginning to realize its importance, after many of them got at least 3 years wrong due to ignoring it – this shift is also evident in their podcast discourse), and focus on wins and nomination counts and so on, which are actually, at best, equally relevant, but not an ounce more. Oscar history proves this amply. It’s the same thing that made them think Stallone was a favorite, despite missing at BAFTA and SAG, only the two most important precursors… Where Rylance got in for both, and everything else, and even won BAFTA. But, no, two wins (Critics Choice, Globes) plus our intuition saying it’s going to be Stallone trump one key precursor win and two massively important snubs, stats-wise, right?! 🙂 Wrong… (Not to mention even the anonymous ballots that year were strongly indicating Stallone was at least iffy for the win, if memory serves.)
2. The fact that not that many people switched over to Moonlight proves one of three things – either that La La Land didn’t lose due to the backlash (but due to the SAG snub, coupled with the WGA defeat – those being the key clues that showed it was weak with the most important voting branches -, like my system explains it), or that the backlash was underestimated by the pundits, or that the backlash wasn’t, for some reason, reflected enough in the opinions of the voters they were talking to… If the former is true, we probably needn’t worry about any backlash this year, either. If the La La Land backlash wasn’t enough to be the actual reason it lost, I don’t see why the Three Billboards backlash would. Moonlight can’t possibly have been ahead by more last year than Three Billboards (if it is ahead) is this year! That seems unlikely. If the backlash theory is true, on the other hand, and the pundits just underestimated it, despite the signs of it being strong, you have to imagine they wouldn’t do the same thing again, just one year later. So point two also leads me to believe the backlash shouldn’t be crucial to one’s prediction this year. (Or perhaps shouldn’t play a part in it at all.) And, lastly, if the backlash was there and just didn’t show up among polled voters enough, well, that should be a fluke (due to the small sample) unlikely to repeat, or, if not, and it can happen at any time, even two years in a row, then the only possible conclusion to be drawn from that is one shouldn’t pay attention to the pundits too much to begin with, either because not more than two of them were able to suss out the win by Moonlight, for whatever reason, meaning they don’t have as much info on what’s actually going on in voters’ heads as we think, or because their talks with voters can so easily mislead them, instead. 🙂 I don’t think the latter is the case – I do think the pundits’ predictions are valuable tools for improving/verifying one’s own -, but I see no logical possibility other than these three (I could be missing something), and in neither case does it seem like one should pay any particular attention to talks of backlash… (Leading back to my stats-only method. Unsurprising that I would reach this conclusion, but maybe it’s also the right one. Seems that way to me.)
3. Last year, if anybody switched at the end (Sasha did, I don’t know about Atchity), they switched to Moonlight, not the other way around, correct? Right at the end, I mean, the last 2-3 days. I don’t think anybody had Moonlight, but switched to La La Land only long after BAFTA. It would certainly be weird if that were the case, given that it won the WGA in-between. This year, there are no late switches to The Shape of Water that I can see. If our theory is that they switch at the last minute due to talks with voters, then we have to assume this isn’t a good sign for Shape.. If the switches are due to some objective reason instead, or even peer pressure/herd mentality, then why three people now, all of a sudden? All at the same time? Nothing new’s happened as far as The Shape of Water is concerned, since BAFTA, so why switch now instead of a few days after that? And Get Out winning the Spirits is far from an upset, plus it lost for screenplay, which IS an upset. Anyway, two of them switched to Three Billboards (which won nothing it wasn’t basically locked to win), not Get Out. It it’s peer pressure – I addressed that above. Finally, if the switches are pure indecision, then why are only Shape people switching, and not also the other way around? (People switching from Get Out/3B to Shape.) It’s not like Three Billboards is some clear favorite (either stats-wise or logically or perception-wise) and people that were being stubborn before are now finally admitting to their mistake. It’s too valid and easy to defend predicting Shape, instead, for this to be the case. All this leads me to believe this has to be related to things they’re hearing, either from voters or from people who are talking to voters. Which doesn’t mean Three Billboards will win, necessarily – those things they’re hearing could still very easily be misleading… (I guess there’s another possibility: it being so close to the ceremony, they’re either looking at things more closely and changing their conclusion as a result, or talking to other pundits predicting 3B than they were before, and getting convinced by their arguments. Neither of these is bad for Three Billboards’ case, though, anyway.)
I’m definitely looking forward to the Gold Derby pre-show this year, to see (if nothing else) whether Joyce Eng explains why she switched to Three Billboards so late in the game! It starts two hours before the ceremony, as you may already know.
This is the first video I have seen that uses actual ballots—simulated albeit—to recast to the next title. Most other videos use artificial numbers so that they can simulate an unrealistic surge for a film.
I have not seen before or read about ties going to the film with the most number of #1s. BTW, I am not going back and redoing all those simulations.
If you’re talking about during the elimination process, not at the end, then I’d like to say I don’t think it matters much – if a movie is close enough to being eliminated that it’s tied for last, it won’t get to the finals anyway, even if it survives that particular round.
The tie in question happens at 3:50. And I agree that it is not really going to matter, but then when it comes down to the top 3, if #2 and #3 tie, then are they both eliminated or do they do the rule of most #1’s?
If it’s the final three and #2 and #3 are tied, then they’re not both eliminated because that would mean #1 automatically wins even though it doesn’t have over 50% of the vote yet. As in the event of any tie, the movie with the lower amount of initial #1 votes would be eliminated first.
This is exactly the situation I encountered for the first time in my own yearly simulation in 2018. 🙂 And, like MrScreenAddict says, it would go against the basic premise of the preferential count for both movies to be eliminated, as the winner would not have reached 50%+1 of the votes. So I think either the movie with fewer initial 1st place votes goes out, or, how I did it (they’re probably too lazy to do it that way – understandably, given the kind of numbers they have to work with), by seeing what would happen in both scenarios (if the first movie was eliminated, then if the second movie was), and eliminating whichever movie would lose by more votes – or, if both would win, then I guess you would have to either eliminate the movie that had fewer initial 1st place votes, or the movie that would win by a smaller margin. (I’d still recommend the latter, because it adheres more closely to the general idea of the preferential count.)
Fortunately for me, the movie with fewer initial 1st place votes would have also lost by a wider margin, and both would have lost, so there was no controversy with my sim. 🙂
I guess it would be weird if one movie won and the other lost… Then, to be fair, you probably would have to just eliminate the movie that had fewer 1st place votes. Otherwise, it would be a bit random for the third movie, the one in the lead – it would have two different ways to lose, as opposed to one, if there was no tie for 2nd-3rd. I’m not sure my logic is sound here – this seems quite a tricky one, and it’s too late in the day (and too close to the Oscar ceremony) for me to sit down and work it out to make sure it’s sound. 🙂 I probably would, otherwise…
Most #1s is the most obvious tiebreaker under this system.
I understand that for final rounds, but is it done, say in round three, for a tie or are the lowest two thrown out?
Any time there’s a tie. There can only be one movie eliminated each and every round.
What if those films have the same numbers of first round #1’s? I say that, because that has happened. Most of the time it’s for the bottom tier titles, but still. Also, do you have a source for your rule? (I am not being snotty here, I want to learn as much as I can about the intricacies of the process.)
Not sure 100%, but I personally would not want the headache of having to redistribute two films’ ballots in a single round because of a tie. Especially since there would be complications of which ballots to redistribute first (as order matters).
I will keep dropping all titles involved in a tie at the bottom going forward. That is way easier for me. But it does raise a question though.