How are the Oscar Nominations Determined?
The Academy goes through a preferential voting system to determine the nominations. 6,000 members choose their top 5 choices on their ballots ranked 1st to 5th. All members vote for Best Picture, while other categories are voted on by people in their specific area of expertise (actors vote for Best Actor/Actress, directors vote for Best Director, etc.).
The ballots are mailed to PricewaterhouseCoopers (and have been for 73 out of 79 years). They are counted by hand (intentionally). They determine the number of votes a movie needs to qualify for a nomination.
Then they go through a process of elimination – the movie with the least number of votes is eliminated, and the votes are redistributed among the remaining movies accordng to the next available choice (number 2 or number 3 if number 2 was eliminated).
They continue this process until the nominees are determined. It’s difficult because if a great movie is put #2 to other movies on people’s ballots, it may not get nominated since it is behind the other "Best Picture" nominees. This explains why movies like Dreamgirls or Cold Mountain weren’t nominated for Best Picture.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences takes a hierarchical approach to determining its Oscar nominees, instead of a straight-forward counting of ballots. It’s a difficult-to-describe process called a Preferential Voting System, and its goal is to reflect the breadth and depth of Academy support. Each year, the Academy publishes a list of qualifying movies, from which the nearly 6,000 members select their top five choices in each category on ballots, ranked first to fifth. All members of the Academy vote for Best Picture, while the other categories are mostly voted on by their respective branches (e.g., only actors vote in the acting categories). Ballots are mailed to PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm that has tabulated ballots for 73 of the past 79 years of the awards. The ballots are counted by hand in an intentionally low-tech manner. Using Best Picture as the example, ballots are first sorted by voters’ No. 1 movie choices, and only these initial movies are in the
