Oscar Voting Process

On the first Sunday in March 2010, the 82nd Academy Awards will take place and the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California will be the center of the entertainment world. However, before anyone can get to say "The envelope, please!," a great deal of work has to be done. The Oscar voting process is as complicated as the polling for a national election; however, with years of refined process, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has found a method that is a winner.

A Bit of Academy History

The Academy Awards, which were given in Spring 1929, are the most prestigious and oldest famous of film awards. The Oscars are presented each year and since 1935, balloting has been handled by Pricewaterhouse (now known as Pricewaterhouse Coopers.) Since 1941, the confidential nomination process has resulted in some of the most celebrated and sometimes surprising events in the Entertainment world.

The Method to End the Madness
AMPAS' voting system uses a preferential system method which is a type of proportional voting. With Pricewaterhouse Coopers coordinating the votingOscar nomination ballots are mailed to AMPAS' active members in late December. Under the AMPAS nominating system, Academy members are allowed to vote as many as five times in their respective occupational category. With nearly 6000 members, actors select actors, directors select directors, and so on. However, in the case of Best Picture nominees, all Academy members make selections. Once the members complete their ballots, the ballots are forwarded to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The First Set of Nominating Ballots
Once the ballots are received, PricewaterhouseCoopers begins tabulating the member preferences. The members' selections are listed in declining preference order. Votes are counted according to member preference. This nomination method creates multiple options for winners for the nearly 25 film categories. This painstaking process of hand tabulation takes about one week. Once PricewaterhouseCoopers tabulates the final count, the final ballot is fashioned and ready for consideration by the membership. Each category, except Best Picture, has five nominees. The Best Picture category has ten, again, as of June 2009.

Tabulating the Final Ballot

Final ballots are mailed to all the voting members of the Academy in late January. The public announcement of the nominees comes soon afterwards at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Once done, Pricewaterhouse Coopers gets back to work receiving and counting ballots.

In order to vote, each member must attest to have seen all the nominated films in the respective categories. Once these ballots are completed, members forward the ballots to Pricewaterhouse Coopers less than one week prior to the presentation ceremony. Pricewaterhouse Coopers tabulates the votes and determines the winners. This process takes three days. Two Price Waterhouse Coopers veterans, in the recent past Brad Oltmanns and Rick Rosas , will place the winner's names in two sets of the envelopes and deliver the sealed envelopes to the Oscar ceremony venue. Rosas and Oltmanns will memorize winners and attend the award ceremony.

Just as it takes time to create a great movie, it also takes great effort to process nominations for the Academy Awards. Pricewaterhouse Coopers is clearly a hero, albeit unsung, for the Oscars, because for almost eight decades they ensure that fairness is part of one of Hollywood's most anticipated evenings.

For more information on the Oscars and the voting process, check out the following websites:

http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/about/voting.html

http://www.pwc.com/US/en/press-releases/2010/PricewaterhouseCoopers-keeps-hollywoods-best-kept-secrets.jhtml