Webinar recap: RCV at the Oscars, featuring former Academy VP Tom Oyer
Ahead of the 2024 Oscars on March 10, FairVote hosted a webinar about how ranked choice voting (RCV) is used in the awards. Deb Otis, our director of research and policy, was joined by Tom Oyer, former senior vice president of member relations and awards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Over his 16 years at the Academy, Tom Oyer was responsible for expanding the use of proportional RCV and implementing rules changes in a number of awards categories. During the webinar, he discussed the Academy’s use of proportional RCV for nominations, its use of single-winner RCV to pick the Best Picture winner (consensus favorite Oppenheimer won that coveted award this year), and how the Academy benefits from RCV.
Webinar Highlights
The Academy has used proportional RCV since the 1930s to narrow down many potential candidates to just five nominees in most categories (and 10 for Best Picture). Tom Oyer shared that Academy members vote for nominees in their own category (i.e. makeup experts vote for Best Makeup and Hairstyling) as well as Best Picture. Oyer said that even though the 10,000 Academy members have a wide range of opinions, proportional RCV ensures nearly all of them see a choice they like nominated:
It’s getting the preferences of a variety of different groups of people that have very different opinions. And so, a lot of times I hear from a lot of members that don’t necessarily agree with all the nominees, but you can tell that at least one, if not more of their choices, probably did get nominated.
Even though RCV has been in place for nominations for close to a century, prior to 2009 the Academy used single-choice voting to select the Best Picture winner. Oyer explained how the category’s expansion – from five to ten nominees – led the Academy to switch to RCV:
Each film could get 10%. And you could have a film winning with 12%, 15%, or any sort of lower percentage than what was desired. And so the decision was really that you wanted to ensure that you had a majority consensus of your voting members in support of your eventual Best Picture winner.
Oyer said he preferred RCV over other options because it lets members vote honestly for films they really like, rather than strategically against films they don’t like:
Rather than having a method where… [you’re voting] against something, it was about shifting it to being more about voting in the affirmative, voting for the ones that you love, the ones that you respond to.
Sometimes people think they have to be overly strategic in how they fill out their ballot. And what we’ve always tried to emphasize is that, actually, you should vote for the films you love and how you truly feel, regardless of whether something’s perceived as a front-runner.
RCV isn’t just used for the Oscars; the Academy implemented it in 2020 for internal elections for its Board of Governors, as part of a package of several reforms. The Academy then elected its first-ever female-majority Board. This is likely an unsurprising fact for reformers who’ve seen New York City elect its first majority-women city council, St. Paul and Las Cruces elect their first all-women city councils, Alaska elect its first woman member of Congress, and Oakland elect its first three women mayors – all after adopting RCV. As Oyer describes:
[The Board of Governors] became a female-majority board for the first time in its history upon the implementation of ranked choice voting. You know, that was a really amazing thing to see happen.
Overall, RCV has proven essential for the Academy to nominate an increasingly broad and representative range of options; pick a Best Picture winner with majority support; allow Academy members to express their true preferences about that year’s films, performances, and craft; and elect more representative internal leadership.
You can watch the full webinar with Tom Oyer on YouTube.
