(Have an Oscars question for Steve Pond? Submit it here.)
John asks a question:
You've posted scans of the Best Picture nomination ballot and the Best Picture ballot where the ten nominees are to be ranked 1-10. But do you have an example of what the rest of the ballot looks like?
Does it look like a scantron? Do voters fill in bubble or write in names?
In my Tuesday piece about what happens to the ballots after they’re returned to PricewaterhouseCoopers, I showed a photo of an entire Oscar ballot, and a scan of one of the panels from that ballot. You can find a more detailed discussion of the ballot in that story, but here’s the scan of one panel.
It’s very low-tech – just a list of the nominees, with boxes to check next to each name. Unlike a couple of years in the 1930s, no write-in candidates allowed.
In the non-acting categories, the names of the movies are listed, but not the names of the nominees. In Best Director, for instance, voters are asked to choose between “Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Precious” and “Up in the Air,” rather than between James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino, Lee Daniels and Jason Reitman.
A question from Nadia:
I just wanted to ask about how much the preferential system should be taken into account by pundits, because it seems like a lot of voters aren't using it from anecdotes.
If every voter just picks a single favorite and doesn’t vote for anything else, then the system won’t come into play. But if most voters at least rank a few films, which I believe they will, then it could have an effect on the count.
It’s not necessary to rank all 10 films for the system to be used, since most of the votes will probably go to films ranked in the first few positions. And despite what some voters would have you believe, the ballot instructions are pretty easy to understand.
Of course, we’ll never really know how much weight we should give the system, since PricewaterhouseCoopers will never tell us how many voters didn’t rank films, or whether preferential had any effect on the final results. To me, the fact that “The Hurt Locker” beat the favored “Avatar” at the Producers Guild, which also uses the preferential system, is a sign that the system can indeed affect the result. But that’s just a guess
Diane asks:
I thought I read that Ernest Borgnine et al refused to see OR vote for “Brokeback Mountain.” I'm assuming he's a member of the Academy? CAN you refuse to see a movie up for an Oscar if you’re a voting member of the Academy??
Except in five categories, the Academy uses the honor system. The official position is that members should see all the nominees before voting in any category, but there is no enforcement: it’s up to members to see the movies, either in theaters, at official Academy screenings or at home on screener DVDs.
