The Oscar ballot deadline has passed.
Ballots were due at PricewaterhouseCoopers at 5 p.m. Tuesday, so if a vote’s not in now, it doesn’t count. No excuses accepted.
So ... what happens next?
Here’s the basic rundown:
TUESDAY
All day long, ballots arrive at PwC’s headquarter in downtown Los Angeles.
Rick Rosas, one of the two partners who oversee the count, once told me the company usually gets a substantial number of last-minute ballots. And years ago, one P.R. firm working Oscar campaigns stationed an observer in that lobby to find out just how many voters cast last-minute ballots.
According to what the head of that firm told me, about 500 ballots (almost 10 percent of the vote) were hand-delivered, messengered or FedExed in over the course of the day.
If everybody votes, and everybody makes the deadline, PwC will end up with 5,777 ballots. Obviously, the real number will be smaller, but Rosas says that usually the level of participation is extraordinarily high.
The ballots are not opened or counted until they’ve all been received – though once all the ballots are in, the envelopes may be opened in preparation for the count.
At this point, the ballots are moved to what is always referred to as an “undisclosed location.” I’ve heard lots of theories about where this is. Somebody once swore to me that they had a friend in a Midwest office of PwC, and that the ballots were definitely flown there – a scenario that seems so unnecessary and logistically hazardous that it has no chance of being true.
A popular theory is that the “undisclosed location” is somewhere inside PwC’s downtown offices, and they only tell us it’s undisclosed to throw us off. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s somewhere close to, but not in, PwC headquarters.
WEDNESDAY
Oscar ballots (see photo above) are eight-and-a-half inches tall by about 20 inches long, and folded into six panels. The first panel contains a single category, Best Picture; the others contain three or four categories each.
The first step is to pull each ballot apart, separating it into separate panels to make the counting easier. The paper on which the ballots are printed is pretty thin, but Rosas and Brad Oltmanns, his partner in overseeing the process, say that it holds up well under all the tearing and stacking.
First off, the panels containing all the Best Picture votes are set aside. (We’ll get to those later.) The rest are divided among the four PwC employees who assist Rosas and Oltmanns. Each gets one-fourth of the ballots, so that none will know the results in any category – though it’s safe to say that in certain cases (Supporting Actor and Actress, anyone?), counting one-fourth of the votes will likely be enough to give each of the four employees a pretty good idea.
The four employees, working in a room with one door and no windows, count the ballots by hand.
