The Lead/Support Thing

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Okri
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Okri »

a) The number is 1/6 of the votes + 1. That is a guarantee you're in the top five

b) Biggest oscar nomination wish: Leonardo DiCaprio misses out. Not because I dislike him (I'd grudgingly vote for him in 2004 and happily in 2013), but because the internet would go mental.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by OscarGuy »

Ok. I think there might still be some confusion over how they tabulate. While I think everyone's slowly understanding it, it might be best to get a little deeper.

All categories are done by preferential balloting (unless a specific category rule says otherwise). This is how Best Picture is tabulated with one exception. I outlined Best Picture in a post on my website earlier this week. http://www.cinemasight.com/how-to-count ... e-ballots/

The difference would be after they stop counting on Step 7. Instead of stopping, if they have fewer than 5 nominees, they'll keep redistributing. I don't think the 5% rule is applied in the case of non-Best Picture categories. I think they keep redistributing the bottom-most pile upwards until you have five nominations.

I believe that when they say simultaneously, they mean what phase of the tabulation the nomination occurs on. So, if during the initial pile-separation phase five individuals get nominations, then tabulation is done and they move on. If not, they set aside those that are automatically nominees and proceed onward. Thus why Mara could hit nomination status in support before she did in lead because, presumably, there are other actresses in lead that are likely to hit the top mark earlier in the process than Mara will be in support.

I don't know if BAFTA uses this rule, but it could explain why Vikander ended up split the way she did. She got nominated for Ex Machina first, which meant that her Danish Girl ballots were tossed for that category and since she had enough in lead, she got the nomination.

It's also important to remember that BAFTA nominates differently than they used to (or the Academy does). The Academy allows craft branches to select their nominations and everyone votes on the winners. At BAFTA (at least as far as I've read), the opposite is true in that the body as a whole selects the nominees and the craft branches select the winners. It could explain why some films did better on the whole (like Bridge of Spies) than they might have had individual crafting branches selected the nominations.
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Sabin
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Sabin »

Oh, man. Read this:

Woman in Gold
Summary: Maria Altmann, an octogenarian Jewish refugee, takes on the Austrian government to recover artwork she believes rightfully belongs to her family.

And it's made $33 million. This nomination could happen.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Sabin »

Addendum: it's not that I have tossed aside the possibility of Helen Mirren and Sarah Silverman but after the SAG-AFTRA merger, one cannot take the nominees with as much seriousness as before. Helen Mirren must be favored more though for Woman in Gold simply by virtue of its appeal to older voters who will sit through the damn thing. Sarah Silverman's nomination sounds like the AFTRA crowd to me.
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The Original BJ
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by The Original BJ »

Mister Tee wrote:
The Original BJ wrote:What if the end result of all of this...

...is that Helen Mirren gets a Best Actress nomination for Woman in Gold?
It is kind of remarkable that most everyone has utterly tossed aside two of the SAG nominees for lead actress.
OMG, this has been Harvey Weinstein's plan all along!
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Sabin »

So if that's the case, then the first question is which category is who going to get the most first place votes? For Rooney Mara, that's clearly Supporting. However by the same logic, that would point to Kate Winslet getting nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Reader unless you look at the Best Actress competition that year that did or did not get nominated (Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Leo, Sally Hawkins, Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet herself for Revolutionary Road) and deduce that voters were more passionate about Kate Winslet even as she split votes with herself and herself and she landed a leading nomination.

As I write this, I realize that this model doesn't favor anybody in the race today because this was the race where Kate Winslet was so overdue for an Oscar that she took the kind of role that years beforehand she mocked on Extras. It also makes me wonder if voters were so turned off or disinterested in Revolutionary Road that they just wrote her down for The Reader as if that was enough. Voters may not love The Danish Girl but I don't see it provoking that kind of reaction from Alicia Vikander.

It is possible then that the top three vote-getters in Best Supporting Actress are Rooney Mara for Carol, Alicia Vikander for Ex Machina, and Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl. Right? Sure, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Jason Leigh will be in the conversation but there is reason to believe that these two actresses with these three performances will be the passionate choices.

I mentioned this on the other thread. I think there is a slight chance we are inflating the chances of Jennifer Lawrence and especially Charlotte Rampling. This is a generalization but nobody liked Joy and nobody saw 45 Years. Rampling did not get a Bafta. She got two awards from critics. So the Emmanuel Riva comparison doesn't entirely work. Jennifer Lawrence won her Golden Globe after voting concluded. And then the next question is: who are the Academy voters that we hate going to vote for? The people who have no taste and possibly haven't seen the films? I could see them writing down "Jennifer Lawrence in Joy."

What Charlotte Rampling has going for her is the number of first place votes she is going to get.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Mister Tee »

The Original BJ wrote:What if the end result of all of this...

...is that Helen Mirren gets a Best Actress nomination for Woman in Gold?
It is kind of remarkable that most everyone has utterly tossed aside two of the SAG nominees for lead actress.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by The Original BJ »

What if the end result of all of this...

...is that Helen Mirren gets a Best Actress nomination for Woman in Gold?
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Mister Tee »

The Original BJ wrote:I THINK what happens is all of the first place votes get counted, and if you pass twenty percent of the votes cast, you are automatically a nominee (at least for the five-film categories). The ballots for those films/actors that received the LEAST number of first place votes then get distributed into the piles of their second choice candidates, until a pile reaches the twenty percent threshold, and then becomes a nominee.

But don't quote me on that, that was just how I thought it worked.
Just to make it slightly more complicated -- and to boggle one's mind with the math -- I think I heard a PwC guy say that, in the five-wide categories, all you need to do to instantly qualify is to get 1/6th of the first place vote. I believe the premise is that, barring the extraordinary unlikelihood of six exactly tied candidates, getting 1/6 of the ballots in first place made it impossible for enough candidates to surpass you to knock you off the list. (I believe in the best picture category it's 1/11th, though I may be misremembering that.)
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by The Original BJ »

I THINK what happens is all of the first place votes get counted, and if you pass twenty percent of the votes cast, you are automatically a nominee (at least for the five-film categories). The ballots for those films/actors that received the LEAST number of first place votes then get distributed into the piles of their second choice candidates, until a pile reaches the twenty percent threshold, and then becomes a nominee.

But don't quote me on that, that was just how I thought it worked.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Sabin »

Forgive me if this has been stated (a LOT has been stated): do they tabulate first place votes first or do they just count them all and keep a running tally but the first place votes are worth more?
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by Mister Tee »

Sabin wrote:This thread has convinced me...that Jacob Tremblay has a better chance of getting a Best Actor nomination than perhaps we have been anticipating. The similarities between him and Keisha Castle-Hughes is there. Nobody in their right mind could ever make the case for either being supporting, there is wider support for Room than Whale Rider, and Best Actor while not barren isn't terribly competitive. To put it simply, Jacob Tremblay WILL be some people's first place choice in some category, right? Especially in two categories where there is more focus on performer than performance (Leo in The Revenant, Sly in Creed for example).
I literally was just coming on to say that, with this new awareness of the rule, I'd be willing to argue there's a better chance of a fraud-rebuking lead nomination on the actor side than actress. Not only is almost the entire putative best actor slate soft, it's a relatively limited field, and a Tremblay (or Dano, or Keaton) might accumulate enough votes for a nomination fairly early on. Meanwhile, supporting actor, so wildly split as we all think it is, might require far more rounds to narrow it down, so even if Tremblay were also to amass enough votes there, it would likely be later in the process.

Castle-Hughes was also, like Tremblay, nominated in support at SAG and (if I'm recalling correctly) nowhere else significant till nominations morning.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by flipp525 »

Sabin wrote:This thread has convinced me...that Jacob Tremblay has a better chance of getting a Best Actor nomination than perhaps we have been anticipating. The similarities between him and Keisha Castle-Hughes is there. Nobody in their right mind could ever make the case for either being supporting, there is wider support for Room than Whale Rider, and Best Actor while not barren isn't terribly competitive. To put it simply, Jacob Tremblay WILL be some people's first place choice in some category, right? Especially in two categories where there is more focus on performer than performance (Leo in The Revenant, Sly in Creed for example).
In my dream, Tremblay's nomination came in supporting. Just saying. A lead nod would be awesome though.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

Post by The Original BJ »

Mister Tee wrote: C) I've genuinely thought for years that the way I initially described it was the system, and I in fact have a good deal of trouble even now figuring how Kate Winslet got her lead nomination in '08 under this rule. She had swept the Globe/SAG/Broadcasters rounds, so I can't believe she didn't make a significant showing in support. Meanwhile, at least theoretically her Revolutionary Road performance would have been siphoning off some of her showing in lead. For it to turn out the way it did seems illogical.
This scenario is perhaps the one instance that gives hope to those of us eternally frustrated by category fraud. As you say, it's hard to believe Winslet WASN'T one of the top choices in Supporting Actress that year, and even harder to believe that she still managed to get more votes for The Reader in Lead than Revolutionary Road. (Given that she had won the Globe for the Mendes film, you imagine that performance had to have been one of the top vote-getters in its category, right?) Plus, I don't recall a smidgen of support for the idea that Winslet might get bumped up for The Reader -- it was just assumed she would get double nominations, even if one was fraudulent, like Moore in '02 or Foxx in '04. So enough Oscar voters A) genuinely had to recognize that her Reader role was not a supporting performance and refuse to vote for it down-ballot, B) had to be willing to go their own way and cite it in lead against the trend, and C) not care that this would prevent her from getting multiple nominations in her big year. There's certainly been much more outcry over fraud this year, which obviously helps the cause, as well as, I'd say, the fact that no one beyond Blanchett/Larson/Ronan seems to have made much of a claim on those last two spots.

For a moment, I wondered if the rules were changed to what Mister Tee thought they were (if you qualify for both categories, you get the lead nod), if that might be a good solution. And there are certain situations -- Mara/Vikander this year, Hailee Steinfeld, Casey Affleck -- where it's possible to imagine fraudsters placing in both races, based on the strength of their performance and/or the weakness of the lead race, and thus getting a bump up. But there are plenty of other scenarios -- Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke -- where it's virtually impossible to imagine those nominees making it even close to a lead nomination, making such a change akin to stopping the bleeding but not really treating the wound.
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Re: The Lead/Support Thing

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This thread has convinced me...that Jacob Tremblay has a better chance of getting a Best Actor nomination than perhaps we have been anticipating. The similarities between him and Keisha Castle-Hughes is there. Nobody in their right mind could ever make the case for either being supporting, there is wider support for Room than Whale Rider, and Best Actor while not barren isn't terribly competitive. To put it simply, Jacob Tremblay WILL be some people's first place choice in some category, right? Especially in two categories where there is more focus on performer than performance (Leo in The Revenant, Sly in Creed for example).
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