Oh Scarfy, OF COURSE you're going to get an expert answer!
Oscar Voting 101: Essentially, the voting process for the Academy Awards is divided into two stages: nominations and voting. Different members of the Academy (defined below) take part in different stages, so it's important to know when each stage is and who votes in what and so on.
Nominations: At the end of each year (around the last week in December) nomination ballots are sent out to each member of the Academy. The Academy (full name: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) is a group of around 6,000 individuals in the film industry. About a quarter of them are actors, but it includes people from all sections of filmmaking from directors to producers to make-up artists and sound mixers. Each of these members belong to an Academy Branch. Someone like Martin Scorsese belongs in the Directors' Branch, and Angelina Jolie in the Actors and Sandy Powell in the Costumers and so on. For the most part, it's obvious.
For the actual nominations, each member gets a ballot designated to that branch, wherein the members of that branch nominate their peers for their specific awards. For example, writers can only nominate people in the Screenplay categories; editors can only nominate people in the editing categories etc. However, everyone can nominate films for Best Picture as that is a wholly synoptic category. Members are then asked to rank their top 5 for each available award. So, for someone like Quentin Tarantino - who's in the Writers' Branch - he could nominate people in Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.*
I could go into detail about the mathematics of how the voting system works (though members rank their five choices, it is, in reality, their first one that makes the difference), but suffice to say that in all of the categories except Best Picture, the 5 films/performances that receive the most Number 1 votes get nominated.
For Best Picture, things are more complicated, especially this year. After the self-described 'failure' of switching to 10 Best Picture nominees, the Academy switched to a system where there could be anywhere between 5 and 10 nominees. The way the number of nominees is chosen is that after all the ballots for Best Picture have been sent in, only those who have received 5% of the total Number 1 placed votes can go forward into the next round. This year, although it seems like the
The Artist has things all sewn up, that there were 9 nominees indicates that there were pockets of passion for many of the remaining films (hence nominations for
The Tree of Life and
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: two very divisive films). In a sense, in order to get a Best Picture nomination, you need to have a
relatively small fanbase in the Academy that puts your film squarely at Number 1 on their ballots.
Voting lasts from the beginning of January for about two weeks. When all the votes have been counted and verified by accountants from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the President of the Academy (accompanied by a young actress, probably nominated at the last year's ceremony) announce the main nominations on US breakfast TV.
*Tarantino could actually nominate people in Best Director as well because of a cool rule that states if you yourself have been received a nomination in a category outside your branch, you can nominate people for that category from the next year onwards.
Voting: About a week after the announcement, final ballots are sent to all of the members of the Academy. This time, everyone in the Academy can vote for the winner in every category (for the most part). So, actors can now vote for writing awards, and cinematographers can vote for sound awards and so on. Instead of ranking the films, voters simply choose one. Unlike the complicated mathematics that goes into determining the nominees, voting is relatively simple, and the
first-past-the-post system is used.
Certain categories are only open to voters can can confirm that they've seen all of the nominated films. Those include the Documentary, Foreign Language, and all of the Short categories. Because not everyone has the time or the desire to see all of these, the eventual winners are normally determined by a much smaller group than the Academy as a whole, leading to an often esoteric set of winners in any given year.
Also, Best Picture proves to be the big, important exception to the FPTP voting described above. Voters still need to rank these ones and the category is determined in the same way (for more info, look at the
Single Transferable Vote system). Because of the voting system, to
win Best Picture at the Oscars, the film needs to be a consensus favourite, which is why
The Artist will win on Sunday. No one hates it, even though there has been a backlash in recent weeks.
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Hopefully that's explained everything, but feel free to ask more questions if I've only caused more confusion.