Oscars 2018: Here's how one wins that coveted Academy Award statue

90th Academy Awards are just around the corner. Considered to be one of the glitziest night of the show business, on Oscars night, Hollywood honours their peers who bested others.

Ever wondered how do they come to deciding who created the perfect movie of that year?

With more than 7000 members on the roster, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences follows a procedure. 

Let's take a look at that procedure.

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To become one of the approximately 7000 voting members of the Academy, you'd better be in the business. Aside from requiring that each member has achieved distinction in the motion picture arts and sciences in their respective fields, candidates must also meet quantitative standards. Writers, producers, and directors must have at least two screen credits to their names, while actors must have credited roles in at least three films. Candidates in the technical branches—like art directors or visual effects supervisors—must be active in their fields for a certain number of years (just how many varies based on the particular area of expertise).

If wannabe Academy members don't have the necessary credentials, they can also find two or more current members to officially sponsor them; their membership is then either approved or denied by an Academy committee and its Board of Governors. But the easiest route to Academy membership is simply to get nominated. Those who were nominated for or won an Oscar the previous year and are not currently a member are automatically considered.

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The Academy is divided into 17 branches, acting branch, directing branch and so on. A member can only belong to and vote for one branch. Ben Affleck, who is the current onscreen Batman and has directed 2012's Best Picture winner Argo, for example, can only be an Academy member as an actor and not as a director, and Brad Pitt who won Oscar for producing 12 Years A Slave and was nominated for his role in Moneyball, can only belong to the Academy as an actor and not a producer. Nominees for each category are decided by votes from the members of the specific branches, for example, only actors get to select the nominees for the acting category.

Members vote on potential nominees for standard awards that are given to individuals or collective groups in up to 25 categories, yet members from each field may only vote to
determine the nominees in their respective field. Directors only vote for Best Director nominees, editors only vote for Best Editing nominees, cinematographers only vote for Best
Cinematography nominees, and actors only vote for nominees in each acting category. Yet all voting members are eligible to vote for potential Best Picture nominees.

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The movie's producer or distributor must sign and submit an Official Screen Credits (OSC) form in early December making sure it meets the criteria.

Criteria:

1. Film must be over 40 minutes in length

2. Must be publicly screened for paid admission in Los Angeles County

3. Must screen for a qualifying run of at least seven straight days and the film cannot have its premiere outside of a theatrical run—screening a film for the first time on television or the Internet

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The ballots are sent out to the members. Voting members are allowed to choose up to five nominees, ranked in order of preference.

The Oscar voting process is managed by an accounting team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who have handled the duties of mailing out ballots and tabulating the results for more than 80 years. The firm mails the ballots of eligible nominees to members of the Academy in December to reflect the previous eligible year with a due date sometime in January of the next year, then tabulates the votes in a process that takes some 1700 hours. 

Specifically, they're looking for the magic number—the amount of votes in each category that automatically turns a potential nominee into an official nominee. To determine the magic number, PwC takes the total number of ballots received for a particular category and divides it by the total possible nominees plus one. An easy example is to take 600 potential ballots for the Best Actor category, divide that by six (five possible nominees plus one), thus making the magic number for the category 100 ballots to become an official nominee.

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The counting—which is still done by hand—starts based on a voter’s first choice selection until someone reaches the magic number. 

Say Ryan Gosling reaches the magic number first for his performance in La La Land, the ballots that named him as a first choice are then all set aside, and there are now four spots left for the Best Actor category. The actor with the fewest first-place votes is automatically knocked out, and those ballots are redistributed based on the voters' second place choices (though the actors still in the running retain their calculated votes from the first round). The counting continues, and actors or different categories rack up redistributed votes until all five spots are filled. If a ballot runs out of selections, that ballot is voided and is no longer in play, which is why it’s important for voters to list five different nominees.

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The Best Picture, however, follows a different process for selection. The Best Picture is selected through a preferential ballot system. The members are asked to rank the eight Best Picture nominations. PwC takes all the ballots and places them in stacks based on the number one vote of each Academy member. The smallest stack is redistributed to what’s second on the ballot, those votes will go on the remaining seven stacks. They do the same with the remaining stacks till you get to a movie that has 50% +1 vote and that will be the winner of Best Picture. The idea behind the preferential ballot system is so that each ballot has a maximum impact. It is a system designed to reward movies that most Academy members like.

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Deciding the winners is much simpler. After the nominees are decided, the whole Academy gets to vote on each category. Each member gets one vote per category—though they're discouraged from voting in categories they don't fully understand or categories in which they haven't seen all the nominated films—and the film or actor with the most votes wins. That process takes PwC just three days.

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The voting process concluded on Tuesday for this year's Academy Awards. Now sit back and wait for final revelation on Monday morning (IST) when Jimmy Kimmel will return to host the ceremony once again.

Watch the 90th Oscars on Star Movies and Star Movies Select HD, March 5 LIVE 5:30 AM, Repeat 8:30 PM