I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for the Oscars. While I recognize the concerns about the process of canon-formation -- the consensus designation of some works as "important" and others as less so -- I also think that canon-formation is inevitable. Future movie fans will want to know what they should want to have seen from the movie crop in 2009, and the performances and works honored this evening -- as well as the reactions we have to those choices, now and in future years -- will guide them. It's going to happen; it might as well happen in a system where a small film like The Hurt Locker can compete with an Avatar, and where small film performance like that of Jeff Bridges can compete with that of George Clooney. And the debates we have about who wuz robbed also contribute to interest in the movies.
But who gets honored tonight is not the very best thing about this year's Academy Awards. The very best thing about this year's Academy Awards is not even a performance at all. It's ... a voting system!
Instant runoff voting, you're ready for your close-up!
And it is about time!
I'm ashamed to say that, as a proponent of Instant Runoff Voting (or "IRV") in political elections, I didn't know about its starring role tonight until yesterday, as I nervously considered my Oscar pool choices. Why I was concerned about the voting system will explain quite a bit about why I -- and you, and everyone -- should favor IRV.
My concern, before I knew that the Academy had adopted IRV, was with the prospect of a surprise loss for The Hurt Locker for Best Picture. You win the pool, after all, not by picking the favorites, but by picking the unexpected victors.
I knew, of course, that the Best Picture ballot had changed to include ten rather than five nominees. At this point, my analysis was this: might it be that The Hurt Locker would split votes with movies that might appeal to similar fans? Avatar seemed to be pretty much sui generis among the nominees; it would not be splitting the vote with anyone. So if, as I thought was the case, voters would vote for only their favorite film, it struck me that it might be more likely -- enough to go against the odds -- that Hurt Locker might split the vote with say, another (albeit quite dissimilar) war film like Inglourious Basterds, allowing Avatar to sneak away with the prize.
We're familiar with this dynamic from too many elections, aren't we? (Florida, President, 2000?)
And then, yesterday, I ran into this bone-chilling paragraph from the New York Times blogger's analysis:
BEST PICTURE: The short answer to which movie will triumph Sunday night is no one really knows. Even the most veteran campaignwatchers are calling off their cheatsheets this year; with 10 nominees, and a new voting method to deal with them all, there are just too many variables.
Uh-oh -- a new voting system! What might that be: ranking them all from one to ten, ten points for being ranked first, nine for second, and so on? Or could it be some truncated or twisted variant of that: five points for your top pick, three points for your second pick, one point for your third pick?
To make my Best Picture choice, I wanted to know, because the system might raise the possibility that partisans of a movie who wanted to spike another movie's chances might rank that movie artificially low so as to prevent their score from being too high. So, if you liked Avatar and The Hurt Locker best among all of the movie, but if you wanted Avatar to win, your best (though perverse) choice might be to rank The Hurt Locker last among all of the entries to hold down its point total. You might want your second-ranked movie to be something that you thought no one else would choose, like, say, The Blind Side or District 9. And, as a result of all of this strategic voting, one of those also-ran movies might well win.
I could imagine, for example, that the widely seen spectacle Avatar would be more likely to rank more highly on more Oscar ballots than the less-widely seen The Hurt Locker (which also had less studio promotional power behind it), and that proponents of the larger film might be better able to mount a campaign to downgrade the smaller film than vice-versa. (Whoever wins, 2009 will be probably remembered as "the Year of Avatar," whether or not it is the best movie, because it is such a technical advance.) So this again would be a reason to predict Avatar over The Hurt Locker.
The only way, if one were convinced that it would come down to Avatar versus The Hurt Locker, that the latter film might have a fair fight is if we conceived a way where eventually voters would have to answer the stark question: which of those two movies was Best Picture of 2009. And that is what Instant Runoff Voting does. Even if, say, 49% of the voters though Avatar was the Best Picture of 2009, and all of them thought that The Hurt Locker was the second-best picture but still ranked it last for strategic reasons, it wouldn't matter so long as The Hurt Locker would survive each round of elimination of other films, one per round. The movie with the least support in any given round is eliminated from the competition and the votes of those who ranked it #1 are each shifted to their #2 choice (if they made one.) No movie wins the prize unless and until it has 50%+1 of the vote remaining in that round. (If you voted for The Blind Side and no other film, and it's eliminated in Round 1, it is as if you didn't vote for the purposes of later rounds.
Eventually, we come down to the pure question: when all of the other films -- let's say that #3 and #4 are Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air -- are eliminated, which of the two remaining movies (once the votes from those also-rans are distributed to their next-best-favored choices) has the most support in a head-to-head competition. There's no way to hide the outcome. If you ranked one or both of them, anywhere on your ballot, you are part of the electorate.
In a two-party system, IRV allows those people who favor "third choices" like, oh, Precious, to still have a say in the final decision. They don't sacrifice their vote because they happen to favor something other than one of the two major candidates. And there is no impetus to place the other major contender lower than you think it deserves, because in the end you have only three choices when it comes to the final face-off between the two leaders: "A > B," "B > A," or "didn't vote for either."
I think it's wonderful that more people will, as a result of the Academy's choice to use Instant Runoff Voting, become aware of a voting system that could give life to third parties without taking away the power of those voters who would rank them first but still have a preference among the two major parties. Instant Runoff Voting, you're going out there as a simple voting system, but you've got to come back a star!
Update:Hat tip (and a little soft-shoe) to T. Maysle, who found an entire blog dedicated to IRV and this year's Oscars!