Academy Awards Update: The Oscar Nomination & Voting Process

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Uses Proportional Voting for Nominations

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses proportional voting (also known as a preferential system) for the selection of Oscar nominees. The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers uses a variant a proportional representation similar to the system that is used to allocate seats in Australia's Senate, the Irish Dial (Parliament) and the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Under the AMPAS nominating system, the Academy's approximately 5,500 members receive their ballots in December. Each AMPAS members is allowed to vote as many as five times in their occupational category (actors for actors, directors for directors, writers for writers, etc.). The candidates that the member votes for are listed in declining preference, from the voter's first choice through the fifth. To determine nominations, the votes will be counted according to the level of preference (first preference before second preference, second before third, etc.).

The idea of a proportional (or preferential) vote is that nominations represent an outcome with multiple winners, and a proportional system more accurately limns the collective judgment of AMPAS voters. In a proportional system, individual voters have more of a chance to have an influence on the outcome.

PricewaterhouseCoopers manually tabulates the responses according to Academy rules. Each year, it takes approximately 1,700 "person-hours" to count and verify the ballots by hand. It takes seven days to count the ballots for nominations and three days to count the ballots for winners.