Behind the Scenes: How Oscar Nominees Are Selected

The nomination ballots for the 80th Academy Awards are due this Saturday at 5 p.m. PST, at which point a team of about a dozen accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers will tabulate the votes. It will take seven days of counting to determine the nominees. It takes that long because the Academy uses the rather complicated preferential-voting system. Furthermore, the counting is done by hand. That's right — in an age of computers, the Oscar nominations are still determined by moving thousands of paper ballots into pile after pile after pile.

The following is a detailed and yet hopefully clear description of exactly how the Oscar nominees are determined.

(1) The Academy is made up of approximately 6,000 members. Each member belongs to a branch — the directing branch, the writing branch, the cinematography branch, etc. You can't belong to multiple branches, so the Coen brothers are out of luck even though they direct, write, and edit their movies.

(2) Each branch votes within its own category: Actors vote for all the acting categories; directors vote in the direction category; and so on. Everybody gets to vote for Best Picture.

(3) Voters are asked to list up to five names, ranked in order of preference. The Academy instructs voters to "follow their hearts" because the voting process doesn't penalize for picking eccentric choices, as we will see. Also, listing the same person or film twice doesn't help their cause — in fact, it actually diminishes their chances.

(4) A "magic number" is devised for each award category. This number is calculated by taking the total number of ballots received for that category and dividing it by the number of possible nominees plus one. So, for Best Actress, say that 600 ballots were received. There are always five nominees chosen for Best Actress, so you divide 600 ballots by six (five potential nominees plus one), which equals 100. That's your magic number.

(5) The magic number is important because as soon as a potential nominee reaches that number, they automatically become an official nominee. And so, the counting begins...