Commentary

I love the Oscars. Everything about them. The good, the bad and the ugly. No matter who wins or loses.

Sure, I would even like one with my name on it someday. It's the most prominent, glamorous awards ceremony in the world. It's also big business.

Winning Best Picture can add between $20 million and $40 million to box-office revenues, so the behind-the-scenes marketing and jostling for both the Oscar nominations and the final awards are legendary.

Which is why I'm pleased the Academy of Motion Pictures has once again turned to ranked-choice voting (aka instant-runoff voting) as the smarter, fairer system to determine the Best Picture award.

Last year, Hollywood switched to ranked-choice voting for the same reason Minneapolis, St. Paul, London, San Francisco and other cities did. It's the fairest way to pick a winner when there are more than two choices on the ballot.

Ten films are up for Best Picture at Sunday's awards ceremony. If the 6,000 or so members of the academy could choose only one, it would be technically possible for a movie to win with only 11 percent of the vote.

This is a scenario the academy wants to avoid, since "spoilers" can make the award less valuable in hindsight. Ranked-choice voting can't guarantee that won't happen, but the consensus process makes it easier for better films to at least have a chance.

Here's how it works: Voting members receive ballots with 10 films listed, and rank their favorites from one to 10. Or, from one to five or one to three, depending on how many of the 10 films they feel deserve recognition.

The ballots ultimately end up in the famed windowless, secret room where accountants make 10 piles, one for each film. In each pile, they put all the ballots that ranked that film No. 1. The smallest pile is eliminated, and all the No. 2 choices from those ballots are redistributed to the remaining films.

This process allows people to vote for the film they honestly liked best without worrying they might be "wasting" their vote on a film that supposedly didn't have a chance.

The counting process goes on for as many rounds as it takes for one film to finally come up with 51 percent of the vote, then -- the envelope, please -- we have a winner, one that really is the top choice of the majority of voters.

Whether you think this was a good result probably depends on how you felt about either of those movies, or about consensus rule in general. Ranked-choice voting favors the movie -- or ideology, or candidate -- that has majority approval.

So how people feel about RCV usually depends on whether they believe their movie or ideology or candidate could eventually win 51 percent or more of the vote.

In my home state of Minnesota, we just went through yet another three-way governor's race. DFL candidate Mark Dayton won by 43.6 percent of the vote, beating out his Republican rival, Tom Emmer, who took in 43.2 percent, and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner, who took in 12 percent. Dayton's margin of victory was fewer than 9,000 votes out of more 2 million cast.

It's the fourth race in a row in which the governor's race has been won with less than 50 percent of the vote. And it comes only two years after Al Franken won a three-way Senate race by 312 votes.

Narrow plurality victories may make for good drama, but they're not good for democracy or even show business in the long run. Which is why I'm hoping Minnesota follows the academy's lead and switches to ranked-choice voting in its statewide elections.

Ali Selim is writer/director of the Independent Spirit Award-winning film "Sweet Land."