The Oscars and Your Winners

Who did you vote for? Read on to see the results of our 2013 Oscar Survey and who SynopsiTV users have voted Best of the Best!

This has been a huge year in movies. Each film nominated for Best Picture deserves it, and there were many great movies in 2012 that were inevitably passed over (Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, and Moonrise Kingdom…not to mention the amazing indie films from this year). It has been speculated that this is one of the best awards seasons in recent history.

This Sunday, February 24th, is the 85th Academy Awards. We will finally find out which of these nominees will take home the little gold Oscar.

So let’s first take a look at what the Oscars are, how they work, and who we expect to win.

What is an Academy Award anyway?

The Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) is something like an honor society for professionals in the business. Members of the Academy make up highly successful individuals from all fields of production, invited in only by existing members.

The purpose of the Academy is to encourage excellence, and their yearly award ceremony (commonly known as the Oscars - a nickname given to the award statue itself) does just that, by honoring filmmaking achievements from the previous year.

How do they decide?

It’s a complicated process of nomination and voting done by members of the Academy. So actually, winners are not based on a populous vote - rather they are chosen by experts in the field.

To be eligible for nomination, the movie must be longer than 40 minutes (excluding the Shorts category), premiered in a movie theater during the appropriate calendar year in 35 or 70mm format or 24-frame digital, and must have played within L.A. County for at least one week.

Films submitted are made available to Academy members and typically only members from each field can submit nominations for the corresponding award category (directors nominate Best Director, etc). Members submit 5 nominations for both Best Picture and their category.

Interesting facts about nominations:

Each foreign country may only submit one film per year.
Actors are nominated for their performances, the category of Best Actor or Supporting Actor is determined later.
Accounting firm PrincewaterhouseCoopers collects the nominations and announces the final ballot.

Once final ballots are sent out, members have two weeks to send in their votes. Most categories are chosen by a simple preferential ballot, but Best Picture voting is a different process.

There will be between five and ten nominees for Best Picture, to get a bid the film needs to be #1 for at least 5% of the voters. Once a #1 film hits 10% over the 5% threshold, the #2 film on those ballots gets a portion the vote, called the surplus rule. Or, the #2 film on ballots whose #1 film does not reach 5% gets the vote.

Only films with at least 1% of first place votes are considered.
The maximum number for contenders is 10.
To increase voter turnout, this year ballots could be sent in electronically as well.

This year SynopsiTV conducted it’s own Oscars, and our process was much more simple than that!

So who will win?

There is almost more hype leading up to the Oscars than there is during the event itself. The Academy Awards happen at the end of the award season, and are regarded the most important of them all. Speculations abound, and although results are not based on the box office, public opinion, or critical review, over the years there have come about trends in voting patterns that the media and fans love to dissect.

What are the variables?

the Hollywood Stock Exchange
box-office success
critical and popular response
success in earlier award ceremonies

The Huffington Post has done an amazing job producing a statistical model of these variables (check it out here) and it has been interesting to watch their predictions change over the past two months.

Les Miserables dreamed a dream in times gone by, when hope was high that Best Picture was theirs.

“There was a time when the world was a song, And the song was exciting. There was a time, Then it all went wrong.”

What went wrong? Lincoln.

Lincoln’s resolution to succeed became more important than any other one thing.

But “if you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me” about how the current forerunner snuck past them.

Argo. The fake movie.

Without a nomination for Best Director, Argo for Best Picture was “the best bad plan we have, sir.” There were “suicide missions in the army that had better odds than this” one to win the night.

But turns out, Argo, “the whole country is watching you.” With a box-office gross of $128 million and an audience rating of 93 (only topped by Django Unchained’s 94), the critical factors in Argo’s rise to the top are the seemingly endless wins at other award ceremonies this season.

Okay, so we’ve heard what probably will happen, but what about you? Throughout January and February we ran a survey to find out what SynopsiTV users and followers felt about the nominees.

Here are our results!

Django. The D is silent.

Our survey has Django Unchained ahead of Argo 4:1. “Gentlemen, you had my curiosity. But now you have my attention.”

No matter what happens, let’s hope we dont have is not a sore losers … or abysmal winners.

So tuck in and watch it, or check back with us for the results next week.

Auf wiedersehen. Bullseye.

- Christy from your SynopsiTV team