One thing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gotten right—as far as we know—is online Oscar voting. The process is fast, secure and presumably accurate. In fact, members are in the middle of it right now, final balloting having begun on Thursday, with an expected close next Tuesday, just five days before the show.
Amazing. The polling seems to come off without a hitch every year. That’s more than you can say for the last few Presidential elections.
So here’s a thought: Why not use the awards vote—either the final round, or the nominations ballot, it doesn’t matter which—to get the Academy’s 9,500 voting members more involved with governance?
Not with petty issues, or with personnel decisions. Those will always be handled by the staff or the Board of Governors. Nor with the fine points of finance, administration or legal status—most members are no more interested in meddling with those matters than Academy leaders are in having them meddle.
But an occasional member referendum, attached to the awards ballot, could be a powerful tool in finding or restoring consensus around issues that affect the Academy’s identity and mission.
Awards Season Calendar: Dates For The Oscars, PGA, WGA, Grammys & More
It’s no secret that members are restless, having been caught off guard by a top-down decision to edge eight awards—including those for Film Editing and Original Score—off the live show, and onto a canned presentation. Anger at that move was as much about the way it was done, without broad discussion, as about substance.
Wouldn’t it have been wiser to poll the members, perhaps in a nonbinding referendum attached to the earlier nominations ballot? If a clear majority favored the cuts, so be it—the board would have had moral support for a tough decision. And if most members opposed the change, well, fine. The governors would have had a mandate to challenge ABC’s insistence that the Oscar broadcast be streamlined at the expense of core cinematic crafts.
There would be no need to disclose the absolute number of votes in either direction—that would force the Academy to break its taboo on telling how many members actually vote for Academy Awards. Just the percentages would be enough to guide honest debate.
(But that much disclosure is a sine qua non. It won’t do to conduct a poll then hide the results, as the Academy did with its last, long-forgotten member survey.)
This might not happen every year. But a referendum would be in order when the Academy comes face-to-face with defining issues, like, for instance, recent decisions to double membership, enforce an industry behavioral code, or impose gender and racial inclusion standards on Best Picture contenders.
It would be good to know what the members actually think about these matters—they are, after all, an intelligent, highly trained professional elite. There’s no good reason to shut them out of the Academy’s affairs.
An occasional referendum would help ground the debate at prospective annual member meetings that have already been promised by the board. More, it would restore confidence in governors who, under current bylaws, aren’t even supposed to discuss board business with those whom they represent.
The online voting mechanism seems to work. Why not use it to get the institution on track?
