So, could Avatar and The Hurt Locker cancel each other out leaving the Weinstein bros. with a chance to stage a second coup d’award this year for Inglorious Basterds?
It’s a possibility – see above :o)
I think even if those films cancelled each other out
Up, and even Precious would have a better shot than IB (in terms of voters)
I really don’t think the Academy will go for IB and I personally did not think it was that great, system or no system. I am really hoping HL or A Serious Man take it and if Avatar wins it I am going back to watching soaps in Univision…
1. A Serious Man
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. District 9 (what a shame this is #3)
4. Up
5. The Hurt Locker
6. Precious
7. An Education
8. Up in the Air
9. Avatar
10. The Blind Side
1. A Serious Man
2. Up
3. The Hurt Locker
4. Inglourious Basterds
5. Up in the Air
6. An Education
7. Avatar
8. District 9
9. Precious
10. The Blind Side
I’ve seen these. This is how I rank them.
Up in the Air
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
An Education
District 9
A Serious Man
Up
Have not seen Avatar, The Blind Side or Precious.
I think those morons in the Academy will choose Avatar.
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.
The seven I saw
1)The hurt Locker
2)District 9
3)A Serious Man
4)Precious
5)Avatar
6)Inglorouis Basterds
7)Up
1-A Serious Man
2-The Hurt Locker
3-Up
4-District 9
5-Inglourious Basterds
6-Avatar
7-Up in the Air
8-Precious
1. Inglourious Basterds
2. A Serious Man
3. Up in the Air
4. The Hurt Locker
5. Up
6. Avatar
What I’ve seen:
1. District 9
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. Up
4. Up in the Air (h8)
What I’ve seen:
01. Inglourious Basterds
02. Up
03. The Hurt Locker
04. Avatar
05. An Education
06. District 9
07. The Blind Side
Fortunately, have seen all Best Pic noms this year…got to be honest I hate this new 10 picture format. Half of these films shouldn’t be on a best picture list, kind of odd but hey whatever.
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Precious
3. Inglourious Basterds
4. A Serious Man
5. An Education
6. Up in the Air
7. Avatar
8. Up
9. District 9
10. The Blind Side
1. Precious
2. Avatar
3. Inglourious Basterds
4. An Education
5. Up
6. Up in the Air
7. A Serious Man
The Blind Side (Haven’t Seen. Might beat out A Serious Man)
District 9 (Haven’t Seen. Might beat out A Serious Man)
The Hurt Locker (Haven’t Seen) I would probably rate this in the top 3 if and when I see it based on what I know about it so far.
UN-fortunately, have seen all this year.
1. A Serious Man
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. The Hurt Locker
4. An Education
5. District 9
then some space to divide the movies I liked from the ones I have to include
6. Up
7. Up in the Air
8. Precious
9. Avatar
10. The Blind Side
Kinda outta the formula on this forum, yet:
Best Actual Real Film: A Serious Man
Also Very Good But Not As Soul-Rattling: The Hurt Locker
Best Damn Fun: Inglourious Basterds
Best Misunderstood Work: Inglourious Basterds
Most Perfect Casting and Writing: Up in the Air
Will Win: Avatar
&
Reason Why Avatar Winning Isn’t Terrible: People did like it. It meant something to them. Maybe more than but at least equal to, say, what A Serious Man means to me.
Also: where’s the forum for bitching about Tilda Swinton’s non-nomination? I’ve gotta some tottering over there to do.
1. An Education
2. Avatar
3. District 9
4. Precious
5. Up
6. The Blind Side
7. The Hurt Locker
8. A Serious Man
9. Up in The Air
10. Inglorious Basterds
1. Inglourious Basterds
2. A Serious Man
3. Up
4. Up In The Air
5. The Hurt Locker
6. An Education
7. District 9
8. The Blind Side
9. Precious
10. Avatar
1 The Hurt Locker
2 A Serious Man
3 Up in the Air
4 Up
5 Avatar
6 Inglourious Basterds
7 District 9
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Up
3. Inglourious Basterds
These are my top three. I don’t really care too much about the rest. I’ll be happy if any of these win SOMETHING.
Also, I’m rooting for The Secret of Kells to win Best Animation (I know Up is in there too) and Granny O’ Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty to win Best Short Animated Film (or something along those lines, not entirely sure of the award titles).
Good luck to all. Everybody who makes a movie puts in a lot of effort and determination and they all deserve recognition.
I haven’t seen enough to rank a list but I hope the Oscars don’t turn out like the AAs. I was annoyed that Sandra Bullock beat Gabourey Sidibe- the award decision failed to recognize that Sandra has been acting for years while Gabourey came out of the woodwork and gave a performance like that
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.
foiled again!
Rich Uncle Skeleton
I’ve seen;
1. A Serious Man (amazing)
2. Up (amazing)
3. The Hurt Locker (very good)
4. Inglourious Basterds (meh)
5. District 9 (meh bordering on bad)
The Academy are allowed to rank the films they haven’t seen so I will take a stab at what I predict I’ll think of the other five – and you have to count it because the Academy would count it with their stupid “you don’t have to watch the films to vote for them” system ;-)
1. A Serious Man
2. Up
3. Up in the Air
4. The Hurt Locker
5. An Education
6. Inglourious Basterds
7. District 9
8. Avatar
9. The Blind Side
10. Precious