TheWrap teamed up with FairVote to stage a poll with the last 10 years of Oscar winners, and one of them dominated the rest
Last week, on the day that Oscar voting began, TheWrap joined with FairVote to host a poll of the last 10 years of Oscar Best Picture winners. The poll was designed both to show which of the past decade’s winners is the favorite, and to illustrate how the Oscars’ ranked-choice (or preferential) system of vote counting works in the Best Picture category. And now, as Oscar voting is closing, here are the results. The answer to which film is the favorite is simple: “Parasite.” Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean film that won the Oscar in 2020, is by far the favorite of the 270 people who participated in the poll. Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” finished second, followed by, in this order, “Spotlight,” “The Shape of Water,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Argo,” “Nomadland,” “Birdman,” “The Artist” and, in last place, “Green Book.” And here’s how it worked – which is essentially the same way the system will work this week as a small team of Oscars accountants at PwC use ranked-choice voting to determine the winner in this year’s Best Picture category. That race, by the way, will likely be far closer than this one, which wasn’t competitive at all. (It should be added that this poll isn’t a scientific sampling, but is just the opinions of the people who took the poll by following links from FairVote and TheWrap.) To begin with, voters were asked to rank all 10 films in their order of preference. To win, a film needed to have 50% of the votes cast, plus one vote – which, with 270 voters, means it needed 136 votes. When all the first-place votes had been tallied, “Parasite” had a commanding lead, with more than three times as many votes as its nearest competitor: 1. “Parasite” – 110 votes 2. “Moonlight” – 32 3. “The Shape of Water” – 23 4. “12 Years a Slave” – 21 5. “Spotlight” – 18 6. “Argo” – 17 7. “Nomadland” – 16 8. “Birdman” – 15 9. “The Artist” – 10 10. “Green Book” – 8 But since the first-place votes for “Parasite” made up 41% of the total number of ballots, it could not be declared the winner. So the count moved to a second round, in which all of the votes for the last-place film, “Green Book,” were re-allocated to the film ranked second on those ballots. This gave one additional vote to “Spotlight” and “Nomadland,” two to “The Shape of Water” and three to “Argo,” the biggest beneficiary of the “Green Book” elimination.
