The Oscar voting process is just as complex as political elections - maybe even more so.
As the Academy Awards are due to take place this coming Sunday, the official voting process has now been closed as and from today, with the count now officially underway.
All told, 6,687 (as of 2017) members of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - that's AMPAS, for short - are eligible to vote and the turnout's like any other voting process. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. After the official nominees are announced, voters normally have a four-week window to watch the movies concerned and cast their vote.
Currently, there is no actual way of determining whether or not voters have actually seen the movies they've voted on. In fact, as recently as last month, Carey Mulligan called for Academy voters to have some kind of verification to ensure they've watched the movies they're voting on.
But how does the actual voting process work? Who counts the votes?
Well, for starters, only a select number of people can actually vote - the members eligible to vote can only vote within their own branch in the first round of voting. In other words, members of AMPAS who are actors can only vote for actors. Directors can only vote for directors, producers only for producers, so on and so on - but all branches can vote for Best Picture.
Not only that, the voting slip encourages people to vote for whatever film they like and are asked to give five choices in order of preference.
Voting begins in January and is done either through paper or online ballot, and the nominations are dwindled down to the official nominees. From there, there's another round of voting that goes right up a few days before the event. The votes are counted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, who then work to determine the magic number for each nominee.
Let's take the Best Actor category for this year as an example with some hypothetical voting numbers. They receive 610 completed ballots in that category, and there's five nominees. So, the accountants divide 610 by 6 - that's five nominees, plus one - to give them 101.6, or 102. So, a nominee has to receive 102 votes to be nominated.
If the number of ballots is a whole number, they use that as the magic number. So, say if they only received 432 completed ballots. Divide that by six, and you get 72. 72 becomes the amount of votes needed to be considered a nominee.
From there, the nominees who've made it through this round are then counted on their first-choice. Say, for example, Joaquin Phoenix gets 102 first-choice votes. He makes it through to the final list. Those who receive the fewest first-choice votes are eliminated, and then these are redistributed to second-choice votes.
The counting goes into a new round, and the second-choice votes are counted again. So, say for example the magic number is 102 and Adam Driver has only 99 first-choice votes. He won't make it through in the first count, but he gets three votes from the redistributed votes from the second round so that gets him through.
This gets repeated into third, fourth and fifth rounds until the magic number gets smaller and smaller, and the number of nominees dwindles down to just five - which is when you arrive at the official nominees. The idea behind this is that smaller films with passionate voters - as in, ones who'd give it a first or second choice vote - are more likely to get ahead than those who'd receive a fifth or sixth choice vote.
Once that's done and the nominees are announced, the voting is opened to everyone in AMPAS. Actors can vote for Best Director, cinematographers can vote for Best Supporting Actress, production designers can vote for Best Original Score - everyone can vote for everyone else.
However, the recent changes in the voting pools mean that a member must be active in the industry for a period of 10 years. In other words, if you were entered into AMPAS in your early twenties, you could still vote in your sixties - even if you didn't make a film in that time.
PricewaterhouseCoopers then tabulates all the votes and delivers the winning envelope in a briefcase that's handcuffed to two senior partners in the firm, who arrive at the ceremony. Only they know the winners, and the votes are counted by hand with a few associates from PwC.
Two duplicates of the winners are made, which both PwC executives carry in case one of them is stolen or misplaced, and both executives have to travel via different routes with security on them at all times.
Of course, all this doesn't matter - and you can still have a f*ck-up like 2017 at the very last moment.