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Decision rules for the Academy Awards versus those for elections.

Article Excerpt
Many researchers have evaluated various decision rules to determine how well they perform in selecting winners in elections. They have established criteria to measure how well these rules perform in selecting winners with the greatest mass appeal in general elections. We evaluate such decision rules on their performance in determining winners of awards for outstanding accomplishment. We examined the procedures the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses to choose nominees and winners for Academy Awards. We chose this example for two reasons. First, the academy uses several decision rules to select nominees and to select the winners from the lists of final nominees. Second, Academy Awards have an enormous impact on earnings and careers. We found that decision rules that can have negative effects in elections based on mass appeal can have positive aspects in determining winners of awards for outstanding accomplishment.

Key words: games: group decisions; voting: committees.

History: This paper was refereed.

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Winning an Academy Award, or simply being nominated for one, is considered to be a significant achievement by most members of professions associated with making movies. An award brings peer recognition, fame, prestige, power, and quite often, dramatic financial gains. Levy (2001) cited many examples of the financial benefits enjoyed as a result of being nominated for an Academy Award. For example, Faye Dunaway was paid $30,000 for her third film, Bonnie and Clyde, for which she received her first nomination as best actress in 1967. Her pay quickly rose to $300,000 per film, despite the fact that she did not win the award. Katharine Hepburn won the award for best actress that year.

In the last 15 years, the increased revenues from winning an Academy Award for Best Picture have been estimated at $5,000,000 to $30,000,000 in the United States and Canada (Levy 2001). American Beauty, which won five awards in 1999, including the best-picture award, provides a dramatic example of the impact of winning an Academy Award. The picture's gross earnings reached $130 million by June 1, 1999, far exceeding projections. Films that win or are nominated for an Academy Award also typically obtain large payoffs when they are sold to be shown on television and when they are transferred to videocassettes and digital video disks (DVDs). In 1984, CBS reportedly paid $4.5 million to show the 1981 winner, Chariots of Fire, and NBC paid more than $12 million for the award nominee, On Golden Pond.

Given the enormous benefits that result from winning or being nominated for an Academy Award, we were interested in seeing how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominates candidates and selects the winners. The period before the awards ceremony each year is marked by "experts" in the popular press giving extensive coverage to nominees and attempting to predict the winners. To our surprise, we found little in the literature that describes how the academy selects nominees and winners for these coveted awards. Our curiosity aroused, we wondered about

(1) The decision rules the academy uses to select nominees and winners for the different award categories and the manner in which they implemented them, and

(2) The relative strengths and weaknesses of these particular decision rules in terms of the properties of the candidates they tend to select. We obtained the answer to our first question by visiting the academy's Web site (www3.oscars.org). In addition, academy officials answered some questions about their method of implementing of the rules. We asked for disguised election balloting data, hoping to analyze the decision rules with realistic information. However, the academy indicated that its auditing firm would not part with such data. Given this limitation, we decided to examine the extensive literature on decision-rule analysis and voting rules to gain some general insights into question (2).

Nomination and Selection Procedures

Each year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences follows a predetermined calendar in qualifying films for awards, sending and receiving nomination ballots, screening nominated films, sending and receiving final ballots, and presenting the awards. The first step in the process is the nomination procedure. Here, academy members reduce the set of all possible candidates for each award category, in most cases, to a set of five final nominees. The academy determines the group of nominators differently in various categories, but each group is composed of academy members associated with the specialization of the category. The number of potential candidates available for consideration each year is so large that the academy must reduce that number to a manageable number of nominees for consideration in the final selection.

The academy stresses that its intent is to "honor outstanding achievements" in making motion pictures. This raises the issue of how one identifies outstanding achievements. All of the nominators might rate some candidate quite high, without rating him or her as the very best. Should such a candidate be considered outstanding? Such a candidate could be viewed as having mass appeal among the nominators, but should such a candidate be viewed as outstanding in the absence of a first-place ranking by a significant number of nominators? The decision rules the academy uses reflect this notion, because it typically employs decision rules that tend to favor candidates with the most first-place rankings. By selecting this approach, the academy might not recognize some candidates with mass appeal, but it reduces the chances of passing over outstanding candidates.

The popular press routinely carries articles criticizing the academy's nominations and final award selections. Much of the criticism concerns popular movies that did not win Academy Awards. However, the academy gives awards to recognize what members consider outstanding accomplishment. That does not necessarily coincide with popularity with the public. If popularity were to be used as the sole basis for recognizing outstanding achievement in the food-service industry, some well-known fast-food chains could be recognized as outstanding restaurants.

For most award categories, the academy selects nominees by using a preferential system or a variation of a weighted scoring rule, and it chooses the ultimate winners using plurality rule. For certain special awards, a committee of academy members determines nominees, and members choose the winner using a two-thirds majority rule.

Nomination by the Preferential System

The academy uses the preferential system for major award categories, including best movie, best actress, and best actor. The nominators get a list of all possible candidates in each category, and each nominator ranks his or her five most-preferred candidates from this list. The academy then uses a fairly complex procedure to sequentially select five finalists, based on the number of times nominators rank the candidates first in their preference rankings during...