Academy Awards Update: The Oscar Nomination & Voting Process

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses proportional voting (also known as a preferential system) for the selection of Oscar nominees. The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers uses a variant of proportional representation similar to the system that is used to allocate seats in Australia's Senate and the Irish Dial.

Under the AMPAS nominating system, the Academy's approximately 5,500 members receive their ballots in December. Each AMPAS members is allowed to vote as many as five times in their occupational category (actors for actors, writers for writers, etc., while all AMPAS members get to vote for Best Picture). Candidates are listed in order of declining preference, from the voter's first choice through the fifth. To determine nominations, the votes are counted according to the level of preference (first preference before second preference, second before third, etc.).

The idea of a proportional (or preferential) vote is that nominations represent an outcome with multiple winners, and a proportional system more accurately limns the collective judgment of AMPAS voters. In a proportional system, individual voters have more of a chance to have an influence on the outcome.

Counting Votes

PricewaterhouseCoopers manually tabulates the responses according to Academy rules. Each year, it takes approximately 1,700 "person-hours" to count and verify the ballots by hand. It takes seven days to count the ballots for nominations and three days to count the ballots for winners.

Using hand-counting, ballots are tabulated initially by collating first-place choices. To be nominated, a person has to have at least one first-place vote. A cut-off is established above which a person is nominated. This initial cut-off number is the total number of ballots divided by six, the number of possible nominees plus one.

If five nominees aren't derived from the initial tabulation, a second pass is made, with first-place choices that already have secured nomination being eliminated, thus creating a new cut-off number for a nomination. The tabulation then deals with second choices, followed by third choices, etc., until the five nominees are picked. Once a candidate receives a nomination, their ballots are removed.

Typically, a candidate who receives 20% support on the first ballot automatically becomes a nominee.

After the nominations are made, there is a second balloting. Actual Academy Award winners are chosen by the traditional "first past the post" system used to elect Congressmen and Members of Parliament in the U.S, Canada and the U.K. A majority isn't needed, simply a plurality, i.e, the candidate with the most votes wins.

Winners

Once the voting is complete, the firm prepares two complete sets of envelopes with the Oscar-winners' names, which are secretly brought to the ceremony by two partners from PricewaterhouseCoopers' 3,000-strong Entertainment and Media practice via separate routes. The two partners overseeing the Academy Awards nomination and voting process are Brad Oltmanns and Rick Rosas.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers partners who attend the Oscar ceremony memorize the award winners so that no mistakes can be made. There is a rumor that Jack Palance erroneously named Marisa Tomei as the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1993, but this is impossible. If a wrong name were to be called, it would be immediately corrected by one of the partners, who would go to the microphone and announce the actual winner.

The only listing of the Oscar-winner is in the envelope itself: The teleprompter does not have the name of the winner since the winner is not known by anyone other than the two PricewaterhouseCoopers partners until the envelope is opened by the Oscar presenter.