With the 91st Academy Awards less than two weeks away, predictions for which movies and actors will take home Oscar gold is at an all-time high. So how exactly does a film win the best picture?
Nomination Eligibility
In order to be even considered for an Oscar nomination a movie has to meet some basic criteria:
- The film has to be more than 40 minutes long (with the exceptions of the categories Best Animated Short and Best Live-Action Short)
- The film has to have been showing for paying customers in a movie theatre in Los Angeles County for at least seven days. For example, this year’s Best Picture nominee Roma was released on Netflix for the general public but in order for the film to be nominated for the Oscars, Netflix released Roma on November 21 at the IFC Center in New York and the Landmark Theatre in Hollywood.
- The film must meet a bunch of technical criteria including audio configurations, image compression ratios, and must be able to be publicly exhibited by means of 35mm or 70mm film.
- The film must have premiered within the previous calendar year. Many indie films work with this rule by having a limited release in major cities such as New York and LA at the end of December and do a wide release at the beginning of the new year. That way these movies do not have to compete at the box office with big blockbuster studio holiday movies. For example, one of this year’s Best Picture nominees, The Favourite, has a limited US release date of November 23, 2018, but had a wide release date of January 1st, 2019.
If a film meets all the criteria, a studio must submit an official screen credits form to the Academy. If the movie is accepted for consideration, the Academy will include it on a “reminder list of eligible releases.” This list is sent out to all voting Academy members. Traditionally, the nominations in each Oscar category are decided by members of the Academy’s specialist “branches.” In other words, screenplay nominations are selected by the writers branch, acting nominations by the actors branch, and so on. There are two exceptions to the nomination rule. Since all members have a stake in which films are put forth as the industry’s most exemplary film of the year, the Academy allows all voting members to nominate 5 to 10 films for the Best Picture award. A film must be the top choice on at least 5% of the ballots to get a Best Picture nomination. Due to the 5% rule, some years there aren’t exactly ten Best Picture nominees.
This year, 347 films were eligible for Best Picture. Nominations for the 91st Academy Awards were announced on Tuesday, January 22, 2019. Out of the eligible 347 films, only 8 films were officially nominated to compete for Best Picture. From that moment on, the studios’ marketing teams are in full swing and high-stakes mode because their Oscar marketing campaigns can influence voters more than the Academy would like to admit.
For Your Consideration: How Studios Use Marketing Campaigns to Woo Oscar Voters
An Oscar campaign can start as early as the Sundance Film Festival which happens every January. The actual big push usually starts around late August and early September with the big festival season. For the past eleven years, every single Best Picture film premiered at one of these world renowned festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, and Toronto. If a film premieres at one of these five film festivals, the film is most likely going to win one of the bigger awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress, and Best Screenplay.
After a film is premiered at one of the five film festivals, studios must keep the film at the center of the conversation as the awards season kicks off around the holidays. This duty lies in the hands of massive marketing campaigns. Marketers come up with highly impactful slogans like 2010’s Best Picture winner The King’s Speech slogan: “find your voice.” Another way to persuade Academy voters is to provide the right A-list access. The 2012 Best Picture The Artist held exclusive screenings hosted by two of Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughters. Other strategies include screeners which are mailed DVDs or digital copies of the film which are sent to every voting member. Winning other awards at the Golden Globes or Critics Choice Awards helps the film’s chances at the Oscars because the film’s other awards prove that it is merited for an Academy Award. To further resonate with the cultural zeitgeist and prove that the film tells a story that needs to be told, marketers need to find a persuasive story to tell. Take the 2016 awards contender, Lion. According to Vanity Fair, the film was initially pushed as a story of a boy reconnecting with his past. Once the film locked down nominations the marketer’s pivot was motivated by President Trump’s immigration policies. The campaign shifted to a framework of an immigrant’s right to a new life. Essentially the marketers told Academy members that a vote for Lion was a vote in support of immigrants. Studios that can come up with a powerful way to pitch their film do best at the Oscars. According to Business Insider, the average campaign cost of a Best Picture winner is $10 million.
Preferential Ballot Voting System: And Best Picture Goes to…the Least Universally Disliked Movie?
After the nominations are announced and the marketing campaigns have wound down, the final round of voting opens often two weeks before the Academy Awards. For the nomination round, Academy members are asked to pick five nominees in the category they actually work in. However, for the final round of voting all academy members vote on all of the categories. In other words, in the nomination round, Meryl Streep can only choose Best Actress nominees but in the final round of voting, Streep gets to vote for not only Best Actress but all the awards, even the more technical awards she may not have knowledge in. This has been a constant critique of the Academy Awards. For example, since not many people understand the difference between Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, why should they be able to choose the winner? Additionally, as exposed in the infamous Hollywood Reporter article series voters are very busy so they may ask their assistants to fill out the ballot, ask their children or pick at random for categories they do not know much about.
Regardless, after the Academy members turn in their ballots, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers tallies up the votes and declares a winner. For most categories, the final round of voting is simple: the film with the most amount of votes will win. Prior to 2009, the Academy of Motion Arts Picture Arts and Sciences would nominate five films, Academy members would choose their favorite and whoever had the most votes would win Best Picture. However, in 2009, the Academy expanded the Best Picture race from five nominees to upwards of ten nominees and started using a preferential ballot system. When voting for Best Picture, all the Academy voters rank all the nominees in order of most liked to least liked. The accountants will then rank the best picture films according to the ballot’s number one choice. If there is a film that has 50.1% of the votes that film is declared the winner. If not, the film with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated. The second choice film on those ballots gets the votes. If no film reaches 50.1% the re-ranking and redistribution process is repeated. If there is a ballot where the second place vote is a film that has already been eliminated the accountants will look for the highest ranked movie that is still in contention and will give the film a vote. If a member only votes for one and the film has already been eliminated, the ballot is thrown out.
The idea behind using a preferential voting system is to make sure each ballot will have maximum influence putting a clear premium to films that academy members place at the top of their ballot. While the idea was well-intentioned, under the preferential voting system, the movie with the second or even third amount of first place votes actually wins Best Picture because they are higher ranked on other people’s ballots. Thus, it is more important to be a consensus favorite, not just the film that most voters rank as their number one choice. A film has to be a consensus favorite to get the extra votes you need to win. Additionally, when it comes down to the last two movies, it does not matter if your film was originally ranked number one and your competitor was ranked number ten. All the matters are which film is higher on the largest number of ballots. In other words, if you want your film to win Best Picture, your film must have the broadest support rather than the most passionate support.
Like many others, Vox’s Culture critic Todd VanDerWerff believes that the new voting system seems to favor a certain type of film. He says, “We’ve had the preferential ranking system for the past ten years and nearly half of those films have been movies about the movies or in some way connects to art and Hollywood. This is because Hollywood loves nothing more than a movie about how magical it is.” The Academy is made up of more than 7,000 film industries professionals who probably enjoy movies about themselves. The voters might not rank a film about showbiz as number one, but they may place it in the second or third which is precisely where it is the most effective to win Best Picture.
Before the preferential ballot system was put in place, bold and polarizing movies such as The Departed, Titanic, and Crash, won Best Picture. These were movies people either despised or loved. We should want movies that inspire those extreme reactions one way or another. Sometimes the movie wins that you hate and other times the movie that you love wins. If organizations such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the Hollywood Foreign Press Association rewarded bold and unique films again, it would open up the door for a genuine discussion about what we as a collective society appreciate when it comes to filmmaking. Isn’t that what awards season is all about–filmmakers and cinephiles coming together to celebrate our shared love of films? I’d rather see that than a movie that everyone was kind of okay with.