The winner of the BAFTAs best film prize has gone on to lose the best picture Oscar each of the last four years.
The winner of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ best film prize has gone on to lose the best picture Oscar each of the last four years: “Boyhood” was felled by “Birdman,” “The Revenant” was routed by “Spotlight,” “La La Land” (infamously) lost to “Moonlight,” and last year, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” bowed to “The Shape of Water.”
What does that mean? First and foremost, it means these are separate voting bodies with separate takes on the year’s films, but it’s notable that the last three or four races have been rather close in the lead-up to the Oscars. The difference-maker, presumably, has been the motion picture academy’s use of the preferential ballot to determine its winner.
So while there is cause for celebration at Netflix with Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” having won the BAFTA prize on Sunday, that ought to be tempered a little bit. The math could still work against it if Universal’s “Green Book” — which already won on a preferential ballot at the Producers Guild Awards — performs well across the membership with plenty of number-two and number-three placements on ballots.
(As a quick refresher, the preferential ballot system works like so: Voters rank their top best picture nominees in the first round, one through five. The film with the least amount of number-one votes after the first round of tallying is eliminated, and the number-two films on those ballots become number-ones. Those ballots are then redistributed as such and the process continues until one film has 50% plus one of the number-one votes, and that is the best picture winner.
