So, using the old system, this would currently be the result…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (5 votes)
The Hurt Locker (4 votes)
Up (2 votes)
Avatar (1 vote)
Up in the Air (1 vote)
A Serious Man would win handily.
But, with the new system, there is no winner until one film has over 50% of the votes by process of eliminating the films with the least votes in each round.
Nothing changes in the second round since the eliminated titles would be The Blind Side, District 9, An Education and Precious, affecting no one’s vote.
So in the third round Avatar and Up in the Air are eliminated, resulting in an extra vote for The Hurt Locker (the person who rated Avatar #1 had no other films on the ballot). Thus…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
The Hurt Locker (5 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (5 votes)
Up (2 votes)
Up is now eliminated, resulting in a vote for Inglourious Basterds (as one ballot only listed already-eliminated films beneath Up). Thus…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (6 votes)
The Hurt Locker (5 votes)
The Hurt Locker is now eliminated, resulting in four votes for Inglourious Basterds and one vote for A Serious Man…
A Serious Man (10 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (10 votes)
So currently, even though A Serious Man had nearly twice the number of #1 votes, it is tied with Inglourious Basterds using the new system.
Patrick’s demonstration of the new Academy Awards Best Picture voting formula!
This year, not only are there ten nominees for Best Picture, but there’s also a new system for voting.
As Entertainment Weekly explains: “Rather than simply check off one of the 10 nominees, Academy members are being asked to rank the contenders from 1 to 10. After all the first-place citations are counted, the film with the fewest votes will be eliminated, and those voters’ second choices will count instead. The process continues until one film has more than 50 percent of the vote.”
So in an attempt to understand how that kind of system works and how it could affect the results, I collected 66 ballots from the members of three movie-related message boards (The Auteurs, Done Deal Pro, Triggerstreet). Of course, with such a limited voting pool, this is by no means an attempt to predict Sunday night’s winner.
We begin by adding up all of the #1 votes. The result is this:
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
The Hurt Locker (15 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (5 votes)
District 9 (5 votes)
Up (4 votes)
Up in the Air (4 votes)
An Education (2 votes)
Precious (2 votes)
Assuming that everyone would have chosen the same film as their #1 under the old system, Inglourious Basterds would just barely eke out a victory.
However, according to the new system, the winner needs over 50% of the vote, and Inglourious Basterds has just less than a quarter of the vote.
Therefore, we move to the next round, where the lowest vote-getter is eliminated.
The Blind Side has no votes and is immediately eliminated, and because that affects no one’s #1 choice, we move on to the next lowest.
An Education and Precious are eliminated, resulting in two new votes for Avatar, one for The Hurt Locker and one for Up (all #2 choices of those balloters whose #1 was eliminated). Thus, the new vote total is:
The Hurt Locker (16 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (7 votes)
District 9 (5 votes)
Up (5 votes)
Up in the Air (4 votes)
Now, Up in the Air is eliminated, resulting in two votes for The Hurt Locker, one for District 9 and one for Up (which is actually the balloter’s #3 pick, because their #2 pick Precious had already been eliminated). Thus:
The Hurt Locker (18 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (7 votes)
District 9 (6 votes)
Up (6 votes)
Now, both District 9 and Up are eliminated, resulting in four votes for Avatar, three for The Hurt Locker, and two for both Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man. One ballot was eliminated completely because it no longer contained any of the four remaining films. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (21 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (18 votes)
A Serious Man (15 votes)
Avatar (11 votes)
The Hurt Locker has pulled ahead, now with almost a third of the vote.
Now, Avatar is eliminated, resulting in four votes for both The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, and three ballots are eliminated completely. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (25 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (22 votes)
A Serious Man (15 votes)
The Hurt Locker leads with just over 40% of the vote.
Finally, A Serious Man is eliminated, resulting in nine votes for The Hurt Locker and six votes for Inglourious Basterds. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (34 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (28 votes)
Even though Inglourious Basterds would have won using the old system, The Hurt Locker ends up winning as a result of the new system by gaining nearly 55% of the votes.
What’s interesting is that even though only 31 voters picked the top two films as their top picks, 62 out of 66 of the voters had an impact on the final vote, with only four of the voters ranking neither of those two films on their lists.
Given that a film would have to have substantial favor to gain over 50% of the vote before a final round head-to-head, this means that when there is a real horserace, such as is the case this year, most Academy members will have the opportunity to affect the outcome, even if their personal preference is for a film that has virtually no chance of winning.
Also, while I’m working with quite an insubstantial amount of data here, the way the math plays out suggests that the new system actually prevents spoiler and dark horses from ruining the chances of one film when there’s two clear frontrunners.
In previous year, we’ve seen several occasions where the populist choice won out over what was largely seen as the more accomplished underdog (Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, Titanic over L.A. Confidential) presumably because those critically-minded voters might have also gravitated towards films like The Shawshank Redemption or Good Will Hunting. Perhaps a system like this would have affected the outcome of those races.
Or take Crash’s surprise win over Brokeback Mountain and consider where the votes would have gone between those two films when other nominees like Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck were eliminated.
Consider this when watching the Oscars on Sunday night, and remember that the conventional wisdom has been that this is a dogfight between Avatar and The Hurt Locker with Inglourious Basterds as a possible dark horse. Think about where the votes would go when one of those three films is eliminated in the next to final round of tallying.
The image for THE FORTUNE COOKIE (http://www.theauteurs.com/films/20180) is incorrect. That is a still from THE FRONT PAGE, which was made eight years later.
If it helps, I created a 448×252 image from THE FORTUNE COOKIE here…
Awful business decision. I really hope you listen to the negative feedback and change it back.
I, for one, am much less likely to recommend this site to other film fans with such a dumb-sounding nonsense word for a name rather than “The Auteurs,” which captured the content and tone of the site perfectly.
Because we have a name that doesn’t mean anything to some people, we felt we should change it to a word that doesn’t mean anything to anyone.
Huh?
Clearly, this is about branding. It’s about marketing and money, not about serving the current clientele and their interests, but making the site more homogeneous to serve a larger clientele.
As I’ve said, I saw this happen in just the same way as a long-term lala.com member, and it was a miserable experience there. Hopefully this isn’t going to be more of the same.
This is a ridiculous, retrogressive question to ask in the first place. It’s like throwing the question “Should illegal immigrants be considered humans?” into a the larger immigration debate. It’s a moving of the goalposts.
Screenplays are, by nature, art. They are a creative enterprise meant to elicit an emotional effect.
The quality of the art is irrelevant. Good art and bad art are art all the same.
The commercial viability of the art is irrelevant. Increased piracy has not made movies or music less of an art form, just as inflation does not make anything greater art.
The notion that screenplays are, by nature, an unfinished product is patently false. Many screenplays are written without the intention of production as a feature film, and the screenplay in and of itself translates a complete narrative.
The real question, the relevant question worthy of debate is… To what extent should a screenwriter be considered the author/auteur of a film based on his or her screenplay?
“please list all the unproduced screenplays that you consider works of art”
All.
“quick, without googling, name ten contemporary screenwriters (not writer/directors) besides charlie kaufman”
William Monaghan, John August, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, David Self, William Broyles Jr., Diablo Cody, Michael Arndt, Ehren Kruger, David Benioff… I could go on, but what’s your point? The question is should they be, not are they.
“some of the Screenplays are art not all of them like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Screenplays,you can read them like novels”
Well, if you want to get into a semantic debate about what is an isn’t art within an art form, that’s another debate that is not limited to the art form of the screenplay.
I’m sure folks here have had debates about whether all movies can be considered art, but it gets into nonsense if you declare cinema as a whole not to be an art form as part of that debate.
From writing samples to personal “pet” projects to postmodern pieces, there are many screenplays that are written without the intention of production, but that’s beside the point.
Though a screenplay can serve in a transitory function towards another piece of art, just as set design and costumes and so on do, that does not negate their status as pieces of creative art unto themselves.
Screenwriting is a creative enterprise meant to elicit an emotional effect, as I first mentioned,
regardless of whether a feature film is created based on the screenplay.
So you missed my point, and your absurd “screenplay as rehearsal” analogy highlights that, because it dismisses both the creative effort and emotional impact of the art.
Therefore, we can rest assured that screenplay fit firmly in the “art” camp without worrying about street-walking, spaghetti-eating and presidential voting being lumped, in despite your alarmist “slippery slope” concerns.
Okay, well now I understand that you are more interested in a battle of rhetoric than in the topic at hand.
Certainly, by claiming to bring us back to the subject at hand and then asking “So would a dress rehearsal technically be performance art?,” you were creating an analogy of the screenplay to the film. If not, you need to sharpen your arguments, or else stop wasting people’s time by trying to lay rhetorical traps.
As for the attempts at ad hominem attacks, those bore me. I’m not here to argue for argument’s sake.
Film Database Submission March 2010 about 3 years ago
My Favorite Year (1982)
Dir: Richard Benjamin
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Let's test the Oscar's Best Picture formula (Please vote!) about 3 years ago
Currently, A SERIOUS MAN wins per the old system, and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS wins per the new system.
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Let's test the Oscar's Best Picture formula (Please vote!) about 3 years ago
So, using the old system, this would currently be the result…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (5 votes)
The Hurt Locker (4 votes)
Up (2 votes)
Avatar (1 vote)
Up in the Air (1 vote)
A Serious Man would win handily.
But, with the new system, there is no winner until one film has over 50% of the votes by process of eliminating the films with the least votes in each round.
Nothing changes in the second round since the eliminated titles would be The Blind Side, District 9, An Education and Precious, affecting no one’s vote.
So in the third round Avatar and Up in the Air are eliminated, resulting in an extra vote for The Hurt Locker (the person who rated Avatar #1 had no other films on the ballot). Thus…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
The Hurt Locker (5 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (5 votes)
Up (2 votes)
Up is now eliminated, resulting in a vote for Inglourious Basterds (as one ballot only listed already-eliminated films beneath Up). Thus…
A Serious Man (9 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (6 votes)
The Hurt Locker (5 votes)
The Hurt Locker is now eliminated, resulting in four votes for Inglourious Basterds and one vote for A Serious Man…
A Serious Man (10 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (10 votes)
So currently, even though A Serious Man had nearly twice the number of #1 votes, it is tied with Inglourious Basterds using the new system.
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Off Topic - Ten favorite bands / music artists about 3 years ago
1. Elliott Smith
No one else comes close. Elliott really had a profound impact on my life.
2. The Walkmen
3. The Clientele
4. Ghosty
5. Built to Spill
6. Mazarin
7. The Kingsbury Manx
8. The Wrens
9. The Minders
10. Lilys
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Let's test the Oscar's Best Picture formula (Please vote!) about 3 years ago
Here’s the final write-up I did on this…
Patrick’s demonstration of the new Academy Awards Best Picture voting formula!
This year, not only are there ten nominees for Best Picture, but there’s also a new system for voting.
As Entertainment Weekly explains: “Rather than simply check off one of the 10 nominees, Academy members are being asked to rank the contenders from 1 to 10. After all the first-place citations are counted, the film with the fewest votes will be eliminated, and those voters’ second choices will count instead. The process continues until one film has more than 50 percent of the vote.”
So in an attempt to understand how that kind of system works and how it could affect the results, I collected 66 ballots from the members of three movie-related message boards (The Auteurs, Done Deal Pro, Triggerstreet). Of course, with such a limited voting pool, this is by no means an attempt to predict Sunday night’s winner.
We begin by adding up all of the #1 votes. The result is this:
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
The Hurt Locker (15 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (5 votes)
District 9 (5 votes)
Up (4 votes)
Up in the Air (4 votes)
An Education (2 votes)
Precious (2 votes)
Assuming that everyone would have chosen the same film as their #1 under the old system, Inglourious Basterds would just barely eke out a victory.
However, according to the new system, the winner needs over 50% of the vote, and Inglourious Basterds has just less than a quarter of the vote.
Therefore, we move to the next round, where the lowest vote-getter is eliminated.
The Blind Side has no votes and is immediately eliminated, and because that affects no one’s #1 choice, we move on to the next lowest.
An Education and Precious are eliminated, resulting in two new votes for Avatar, one for The Hurt Locker and one for Up (all #2 choices of those balloters whose #1 was eliminated). Thus, the new vote total is:
The Hurt Locker (16 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (7 votes)
District 9 (5 votes)
Up (5 votes)
Up in the Air (4 votes)
Now, Up in the Air is eliminated, resulting in two votes for The Hurt Locker, one for District 9 and one for Up (which is actually the balloter’s #3 pick, because their #2 pick Precious had already been eliminated). Thus:
The Hurt Locker (18 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (16 votes)
A Serious Man (13 votes)
Avatar (7 votes)
District 9 (6 votes)
Up (6 votes)
Now, both District 9 and Up are eliminated, resulting in four votes for Avatar, three for The Hurt Locker, and two for both Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man. One ballot was eliminated completely because it no longer contained any of the four remaining films. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (21 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (18 votes)
A Serious Man (15 votes)
Avatar (11 votes)
The Hurt Locker has pulled ahead, now with almost a third of the vote.
Now, Avatar is eliminated, resulting in four votes for both The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, and three ballots are eliminated completely. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (25 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (22 votes)
A Serious Man (15 votes)
The Hurt Locker leads with just over 40% of the vote.
Finally, A Serious Man is eliminated, resulting in nine votes for The Hurt Locker and six votes for Inglourious Basterds. Thus:
The Hurt Locker (34 votes)
Inglourious Basterds (28 votes)
Even though Inglourious Basterds would have won using the old system, The Hurt Locker ends up winning as a result of the new system by gaining nearly 55% of the votes.
What’s interesting is that even though only 31 voters picked the top two films as their top picks, 62 out of 66 of the voters had an impact on the final vote, with only four of the voters ranking neither of those two films on their lists.
Given that a film would have to have substantial favor to gain over 50% of the vote before a final round head-to-head, this means that when there is a real horserace, such as is the case this year, most Academy members will have the opportunity to affect the outcome, even if their personal preference is for a film that has virtually no chance of winning.
Also, while I’m working with quite an insubstantial amount of data here, the way the math plays out suggests that the new system actually prevents spoiler and dark horses from ruining the chances of one film when there’s two clear frontrunners.
In previous year, we’ve seen several occasions where the populist choice won out over what was largely seen as the more accomplished underdog (Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, Titanic over L.A. Confidential) presumably because those critically-minded voters might have also gravitated towards films like The Shawshank Redemption or Good Will Hunting. Perhaps a system like this would have affected the outcome of those races.
Or take Crash’s surprise win over Brokeback Mountain and consider where the votes would have gone between those two films when other nominees like Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck were eliminated.
Consider this when watching the Oscars on Sunday night, and remember that the conventional wisdom has been that this is a dogfight between Avatar and The Hurt Locker with Inglourious Basterds as a possible dark horse. Think about where the votes would go when one of those three films is eliminated in the next to final round of tallying.
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Help make The Auteurs totally awesome about 3 years ago
The image for THE FORTUNE COOKIE (http://www.theauteurs.com/films/20180) is incorrect. That is a still from THE FRONT PAGE, which was made eight years later.
If it helps, I created a 448×252 image from THE FORTUNE COOKIE here…
URL: http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n269/TheKeenGuy/fortunecookieauteurs.jpg
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Why did we change our name to MUBI? about 3 years ago
Awful business decision. I really hope you listen to the negative feedback and change it back.
I, for one, am much less likely to recommend this site to other film fans with such a dumb-sounding nonsense word for a name rather than “The Auteurs,” which captured the content and tone of the site perfectly.
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Why did we change our name to MUBI? about 3 years ago
I just realized, this is a calculated business decision to become the movie version of lala.com.
Give it about a year, and this site will be purchased by Apple for millions of dollars and then dismantled.
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Why did we change our name to MUBI? about 3 years ago
The explanation simply isn’t coherent.
Because we have a name that doesn’t mean anything to some people, we felt we should change it to a word that doesn’t mean anything to anyone.
Huh?
Clearly, this is about branding. It’s about marketing and money, not about serving the current clientele and their interests, but making the site more homogeneous to serve a larger clientele.
As I’ve said, I saw this happen in just the same way as a long-term lala.com member, and it was a miserable experience there. Hopefully this isn’t going to be more of the same.
Go to Comment
Why did we change our name to MUBI? about 3 years ago
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/05/13/the_auteurs_is_now_mubi/
As this article confirms, it’s a marketing decision about branding, aimed at growing the clientele into the millions.
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MUBI: VOTE about 3 years ago
I preferred “theauteurs.com”: (15)
I prefer “mubi.com”: (0)
I would prefer another name: (1)
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Films that begin with a phone call about 3 years ago
The original cut of IDENTITY.
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Is the Screenplay Art? almost 3 years ago
This is a ridiculous, retrogressive question to ask in the first place. It’s like throwing the question “Should illegal immigrants be considered humans?” into a the larger immigration debate. It’s a moving of the goalposts.
Screenplays are, by nature, art. They are a creative enterprise meant to elicit an emotional effect.
The quality of the art is irrelevant. Good art and bad art are art all the same.
The commercial viability of the art is irrelevant. Increased piracy has not made movies or music less of an art form, just as inflation does not make anything greater art.
The notion that screenplays are, by nature, an unfinished product is patently false. Many screenplays are written without the intention of production as a feature film, and the screenplay in and of itself translates a complete narrative.
The real question, the relevant question worthy of debate is… To what extent should a screenwriter be considered the author/auteur of a film based on his or her screenplay?
Go to Comment
Is the Screenplay Art? almost 3 years ago
“please list all the unproduced screenplays that you consider works of art”
All.
“quick, without googling, name ten contemporary screenwriters (not writer/directors) besides charlie kaufman”
William Monaghan, John August, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, David Self, William Broyles Jr., Diablo Cody, Michael Arndt, Ehren Kruger, David Benioff… I could go on, but what’s your point? The question is should they be, not are they.
Go to Comment
Is the Screenplay Art? almost 3 years ago
“some of the Screenplays are art not all of them like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Screenplays,you can read them like novels”
Well, if you want to get into a semantic debate about what is an isn’t art within an art form, that’s another debate that is not limited to the art form of the screenplay.
I’m sure folks here have had debates about whether all movies can be considered art, but it gets into nonsense if you declare cinema as a whole not to be an art form as part of that debate.
Go to Comment
Is the Screenplay Art? almost 3 years ago
From writing samples to personal “pet” projects to postmodern pieces, there are many screenplays that are written without the intention of production, but that’s beside the point.
Though a screenplay can serve in a transitory function towards another piece of art, just as set design and costumes and so on do, that does not negate their status as pieces of creative art unto themselves.
Go to Comment
Is the Screenplay Art? almost 3 years ago
Screenwriting is a creative enterprise meant to elicit an emotional effect, as I first mentioned,
regardless of whether a feature film is created based on the screenplay.
So you missed my point, and your absurd “screenplay as rehearsal” analogy highlights that, because it dismisses both the creative effort and emotional impact of the art.
Therefore, we can rest assured that screenplay fit firmly in the “art” camp without worrying about street-walking, spaghetti-eating and presidential voting being lumped, in despite your alarmist “slippery slope” concerns.
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Pitch me the worst idea for a movie you can think of almost 3 years ago
I’ll pitch you one that’s both terrifying and inevitable…
A remake of BACK TO THE FUTURE.
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Is the Screenplay Art? over 2 years ago
Okay, well now I understand that you are more interested in a battle of rhetoric than in the topic at hand.
Certainly, by claiming to bring us back to the subject at hand and then asking “So would a dress rehearsal technically be performance art?,” you were creating an analogy of the screenplay to the film. If not, you need to sharpen your arguments, or else stop wasting people’s time by trying to lay rhetorical traps.
As for the attempts at ad hominem attacks, those bore me. I’m not here to argue for argument’s sake.
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Tarantino's next movie over 2 years ago
He already did a spaghetti western. It’s called INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
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