You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
John Lydgate
The above quote is frequently attributed to Abraham Lincoln (though Lincoln actually substituted ‘fool’ for ‘please’, in a bit of West Wing-style trivia for you, say what you will of “Honest Abe”), and applies to many things in life. Since this is a movie blog, and the Oscars changed the practice of counting votes for the Best Picture, today it applies to the practice of counting votes for the Best Picture. The Academy used to adopt both approaches – favouring all in the selection of nominees, but only some (as little as 18%) in its selection of winners – but now it looks like the academy is shifting towards adjusting the selection of winners to allow all (well, a lot more than before) members some say in the matter.
Anyway, we’ve put together a little maths guide to how the new system will work in practice.
If I have one Oscar statuettes, and Jack Nicholson stands next to mewith his three Oscar statuettes, how inferior am I going to feel?
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: academy, AMPAS, awards, best picture, cinema, democracy, elections, examples, film, maths, Movies, Oscars, plurality, single transferable vote, stv, voting, voting for dummies | Leave a comment »
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