TCTTS said:
I totally hear you. That said, I can't emphasize enough how much everyone I know in the industry mocks this movie, how much every movie podcast I've heard discuss the Oscars has reiterated that they don't know a single person in the industry who likes this movie, and how many tweets I've seen today from industry insiders who have expressed shock/rage/disappointment/embarrassment that this movie is somehow even in the race. I really do think it's a super-far-left/international voter thing from a loud minority, almost as a last-gasp death rattle in the face of Trump being re-elected, that is not at all representative of how most people in this industry/town actually view it.
From Matt Belloni's newsletter tonight, which is along the lines of what I was saying...
Quote:
The political stakes on Oscar night: When is an Oscar race a referendum on Hollywood and the U.S. president? The 13 nominations for Emilia Prez instantly creates a frontrunner for best picture, but it's hardly a runaway, and I'd argue that with the preferential ballot, which is designed to reward consensus rather than polarizing films, five or arguably six of the nominees could actually win. (The others: Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, and Wicked.) The Academy's choice will almost certainly be scrutinized by Donald Trump and his fellow culture warriors, so either voters want to stick it to the openly anti-transgender president and pick the movie built around its trans star, or the Academy would prefer to not poke the bear and instead go for something else.
Please God let it be the latter. The discourse would be absolutely unbearable otherwise.
That said, the preferential voting thing is a good point and gives me hope. For those curious...
Quote:
In 2009, when the Oscar nominations were announced and Christopher Nolan's acclaimed 2008 comic book adaptation was not among the five nominees for best picture - bounced, in all likelihood, by a Holocaust movie, The Reader - it sparked outrage that convinced the Academy to take action. The organization's board of governors voted to expand the best picture category from five nominees - at which it had been capped for 65 years, since the year after Casablanca won best picture - to 10 in the hopes of increasing the likelihood that a popular film like The Dark Knight would be nominated for the top prize in the future. (A few years later, the Academy decided to change its approach yet again so that anywhere from five to 10 nominees could end up nominated for best picture.)
With the expansion of the best picture category, the Academy also changed the voting method to determine the winner. The organization realized that a polarizing film could, in a year in which votes were really spread around, conceivably win with the support of only a small percentage of members, and that seemed wrong. A film like 2011's The Tree of Life, for instance, was, in my judgment, beloved by some members, but strongly disliked by many more. It ended up losing to The Artist, but it could have won had the Academy not implemented a form of voting, for the best picture category only, that it had previously employed pre-1944, when it last had more than five nominees for best picture.
That system, brought back in 2009 and still employed to this day, is referred to as the "preferential ballot." The point of it is to ensure that the best picture winner is the movie that is the most widely liked by the electorate.
How does that work? Members are asked to rank all of the best picture nominees from best to worst - and then the rest is handled by PwC, the Academy's longtime accountants. PwC begins by sorting through the best picture ballots and creating piles for each film listed in the top spot on a ballot.
Unless a single film dominates by appearing in the No. 1 spot of more than 50 percent of all ballots - which can be difficult to do in a field of eight nominees - PwC then removes the film that has the smallest pile of No. 1 votes. But to ensure that that film's supporters still have some influence on the outcome, PwC redistributes the ballots in that pile according to which film each ballot lists as its No. 2 choice.
This process can continue for several rounds - the film with the smallest pile of ballots is eliminated and its ballots are redistributed according to its second-place choice, or its third-place choice, if the second-choice film has already been eliminated, and so on. That continues until one film's pile accounts for more than 50 percent of all ballots.
