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Oscar's Latest Change -- Hollywood Reacts
Around town and around the web, there’s been plenty of fuss about the effect of the new best-picture voting rules. Some examples:
At In Contention, Kris Tapley says it’ll level the playing field and stifle block voting.
Entertainment Weekly’s Dave Karger thinks Oscar campaigners will have to “canvass more broadly” to secure those number two and number three rankings.
On the Gold Derby Forums at the Envelope, one poster speculated that it’ll mean animated pictures will start winning best picture. Another says it’ll cause some voters to get political and rank the strongest competitors at the bottom of their ballots.
Craig Kennedy from Living in Cinema thinks it’ll lead to more spending on Oscar campaigns.
Movie City News’ David Poland applauds the change, but thinks it’d be better if the threshold for winning was lowered from 50 percent to 33.3 percent.
Sasha Stone at Awards Daily says it makes her head spin.
Nikki Finke naturally thinks it’ll distort the will of the voters, and is just another awful way in which the horrible AMPAS prez Tom Sherak is ruining the Oscars.
The political group FairVote, which champions preferential (or “instant runoff”) voting as the fairest way to conduct elections, issued a press release touting the Academy’s decision as a way in which “reform backed by Obama and McCain can improve real world elections.”
The L.A. Times says it knew this was going to happen.
FilmSchoolRejects suspect that some ballots will have to be discarded because voters won’t fill them out correctly.
Awards Campaign's Greg Elwood gets a little turned around, and somehow concludes that preferential voting is being extended from the final voting into the nominations process, instead of the other way around. This leads him to a completely impossible explanation for how Crash might have beaten Brokeback Mountain.
Other commentators, including The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, predict more splits between the best-picture and best-director winners, since the two awards will now be tallied using different methods.
A commentator on Poland’s Hot Blog advances a modest proposal: structure the Oscar broadcast like a countdown show, revealing the order of finish from number 10 to number one..
And among the people I’ve talked to, I get the sense that a) it’s all fine and good to talk about spending more money on campaigns, but if the money's not there it won't be spent, because only Harvey Weinstein spends money he doesn’t have on Oscar pushes; and b) the rules are still confusing to many people in the business.
As one veteran of the Oscar wars sums it up: “Right now there’s nothing but confusion, frankly.”
Comments
Bob T. Says
Let's take a look at how IRV would work. First we will agree on one thing:
The voters agree on this:
40% prefer Harry Potter over Star Trek (40% Harry Potter > Star Trek)
60% Star Trek over Harry Potter (60% Star Trek > Harry Potter)
Now let's add a third movie, but we will keep the above the same (pairwise)
Rank
1 2 3
40% Harry Potter > Angels & Demons > Star Trek
35% Angels & Demons > Star Trek > Harry Potter
25% Star Trek > Harry Potter > Angels & Demons
You can see that 40% still prefer Harry Potter over Star Trek, and 60% (35% + 25%) prefer Star Trek over Harry Potter.
Let's run this through IRV.
In IRV, the movie with the lowest votes gets eliminated and the voters second choice gets distributed.
Star Trek has the lowest votes, so it is eliminated, thus transferring 25 votes to Harry Potter.
Giving us:
Harry Potter 40 + 25(transfered) = 65%
Angels and Demons 35%
Harry Potter WINS!?
Number of votes 1st Preference 2nd Preference
39 Star Trek Harry Potter
35 Harry Potter Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons Star Trek
In this example, Angels and Demons is eliminated, thus transferring 26 votes to Star Trek:
Number of votes 1st Preference 2nd Preference
39 Star Trek Harry Potter
35 Harry Potter Angels and Demons
26 Star Trek
39+26 = 65 for Star Trek 35 for Harry Potter. STAR TREK IS THE WINNER.
But before the voting, a big push was made by the studio and convinced many people who wold have voted Harry Potter first, to rank Star Trek 1st, and Harry Potter 2nd. They got got 10 MORE VOTES, that would have voted for HP. Look at it now:
Number of votes 1st Preference 2nd Preference
49 Star Trek Harry Potter
25 Harry Potter Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons Star Trek
With IRV, the movie with the least number of votes is eliminated. Now Harry Potter is eliminated thus transferring 25 votes to Angels and Demons.
Number of votes 1st Preference 2nd Preference
49 Star Trek Harry Potter
25 Angels and Demons
26 Angels and Demons Star Trek
49 for Star Trek 25+26=51 for Angels and Demons. ANGELS AND DEMONS IS THE WINNER!????
This is IRV's non-monotonicity effect, the anomaly where by voting for your favorite can hurt your favorite. This is well know and admitted by FairVote and has been the subject of a federal lawsuit with more to come.
Do anyone really think IRV is a good idea after seeing these examples? Only by auditing the raw votes (as can be done in public elections) can you tell if you got screwed.