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Oscars 2015: How does Academy Award voting work?

For most Oscar watchers, there are two days of every year that are of special concern: the morning the Academy Award nominees are announced and then Oscar night itself. While these two occasions are the most public face of the Academy Awards, there is much more to the the Oscars process than meets the eye. Ever wondered about who the Academy voters are? Want to know how the nominees and winners are picked? Here’s a primer on how Oscar voting works.

Who are the Academy?

Though a full list of AMPAS membership has never officially been publicized, the names of new members are published when they join the Academy, as are the names of members who join the Board of Governors.

There are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, if an actor, actress, or other person in the film business has ever been nominated for an Oscar, it’s almost guaranteed that they are a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Members invited to join over the past several years include Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Jesse Eisenberg, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jason Bateman, John Hawkes, Mia Wasikowska, and Rooney Mara. Some of the current governors include Tom Hanks, Annette Benning, and Ed Begley Jr. for the Acting branch, and Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”), Michael Mann (“Public Enemies”), and Lisa Cholodenko (“The Kids are All Right”) for the Directing branch.

There are more than 6,000 AMPAS members. According to a 2012 Los Angeles Times study, 33 per cent of Academy of members are previous Oscar winners or nominees. The same study found that the Academy is 94 per cent caucasian, 77 per cent male, and has a median age of 62 years old. What a diverse bunch!

How do you become a member?

AMPAS membership is by invitation only from the Board of Governors. Eligibility for Academy membership is somewhat vague, but the basic rule of thumb is that a member must be “a film artist or craftsperson working in one or more of the art form’s key creative areas” whose work represents “an unusually high level of quality and distinction.” One can become a member either by earning an Oscar nomination in any competitive category or by having an existing member submit a name based on significant contributions to the medium. Basically, you can get in if existing AMPAS members and voters think you’re good enough to be one of them.

Individual Academy branches (there are 17 in all) also have rules for membership. For example, actors must have performed in speaking roles in at least three movies to qualify for membership in the Acting branch. Similarly, many other branches (like Art Directors and Visual Effects) require prospective members to have been a working professional in their respective fields for a certain number of years. Even if someone works in multiple film-related fields, members cannot belong to more than one branch.

With so many rules, requirements, and hoops to jump through, becoming a member of the Academy is no small task. But once you are in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences your membership never expires. You’re an Oscar voter for life!

How do Oscar nominations work? How do members vote? Who votes for what?

Eligible movies must meet certain criteria in order to even be considered for nomination. The film must have a duration longer than 40 minutes, it must have premiered during the previous calendar year between Jan. 1 and December 31, it must have played for at least a week at public movie theater in the Los Angeles area, and the movie must have been presented in an approved format such as 35mm/70mm film or in 24 frames-per-second/48 frames-per-second digital format at 2K resolution.

If a movie meets all the eligibility requirements, its distributors can then submit it for consideration. As previously mentioned, the Academy is divided into 17 separate branches: Actors, Casting Directors, Cinematographers, Costume Designers, Designers, Directors, Documentary, Executives, Film Editors, Makeup Artists and Hairstylists, Music Producers, Public Relations, Short Films and Feature Animation, Sound, Visual Effects, and Writers.

Ballots are sent out to Academy members in December along with a list of eligible releases. Around this time studios and distributors make sure that AMPAS members are either shown the eligible films theatrically or sent screener copies of the movies to inform their voting decisions.

Members from each branch vote to nominate eligible films their respective Oscar categories -- actors vote for actors, directors for directors, editors for editors, etc. However, every AMPAS member, regardless of what branch they belong to, votes to select the Best Picture nominees. Voters choose five nominees per category and the top five voted in each category become the nominees (except for Best Picture, which can include up to ten films). After the nominations are determined and announced, voters are then sent a final ballot and given a few weeks to pick the winners.

How are the winners kept secret?

Once the winners are chosen, you might be wondering how the Academy tallies the votes and keeps the names secret? That's where the professional service firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) comes in.

Academy members mail their final ballots to PwC and the company proceeds to certify and tabulate the results in complete secrecy. The results are only known to two PwC tabulators, who are locked in a counting room under armed guard. The tabulators then seal the winners names inside the envelopes that will be opened on Oscar night. In the interim, the envelopes are kept under lock and key until they are handed one by one to the presenters during the Oscars. Quite appropriately, the process is like something out of a spy movie.

So there you have it! The entire Oscar process is an extremely complex one rooted in nearly a century of formality and tradition, a process unlikely to change any time soon. We may know how it all works now, but we'll have to wait until Feb. 22 to find out who will win this year.