Who votes for the Oscar?

After the arrival of the gorgeous red carpet, the feel-good montage and the barbecue opened by the host, the Oscar ceremony turned to the reason for its existence: revealing the highest achievers in the film industry in the previous year. The host lists the nominees one by one, opens a luxurious envelope and announces the winners of each category. The champions panted and accepted their awards, and thanked their mothers, God and the college warmly again and again. During the whole ceremony, the college gave it so much thanks that many of us who watched at home might begin to wonder: What is this humble corpse? The answer is not as fascinating as people think. The Academy-the The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences（AMPAS）-is an organization that votes for Oscar winners. Perhaps it is more interesting to find out who the members of the college are and how they vote.

This college is a unique institution in Hollywood, with its own governing body (properly called the board of directors), 17 independent branches, and a detailed rulebook on membership and voting procedures. Since the board of directors announced the diversity of members in 216, the college has grown to about 8, members. It won't publish the names of all these members, but every spring it publishes a list of individuals invited to join its ranks. Invitees include Mindy Kaling, Rashida Jones, Kendrick Lamar, Melissa Etheridge and JK Rowling. The Academy also posts the names of members of its current board of governors, which includes elected representatives of the 17 branches. These branches represent various fields of film: performance, directing, writing, sound editing and so on. According to the website of the college in 219, the chairman of the board of directors is cinematographer john ashbery, the first vice president is makeup artist Lois Burwell, and other officials include actors laura dern, whoopi goldberg and Alfred Molina.

The rest of the college members are not listed, but we can guess a few of them by looking at some requirements for joining the organization. To qualify, an individual must work in the film industry. This means that individuals who specialize in television or members of the press are not allowed to join. Oscar nominees are usually automatically considered as members, while other candidates must be sponsored by two active members of the club they wish to join. Each branch also has its own specific requirements. For example, a director must have at least two directing credits, at least one of which has been in the past 1 years. So we can be sure that people like Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have been nominated for many times and won Oscars. They are all members of the academy. New members can only choose one of the clubs to join. This means that Sofia Coppola and Alfonso Cuarón, for example, have been nominated and won an Oscar. They can sign a contract with the director department or the writing department, but not both.

Although the members of the college are largely vague, the voting process may be only slightly clearer. It includes two stages: first, nomination of Oscar candidates, and second, voting for winners. In the first stage, members will receive a ballot paper listing eligible movies. To be nominated, a film must be a feature film, and it must be shown in a commercial theater in Los Angeles County for at least one week from January 1 to December 31 of the award year. Documentaries and foreign films have their own qualification requirements. Members can only nominate awards and best films in their branches. Emma Stone, therefore, may recommend nominations for best actress, actor, supporting actress and supporting actor, but she may not nominate candidates for best sound editing or best mixing category. Each member of the college selects up to five candidates for each designated category and lists them by preference.

In order to determine the nominees of each category, the votes are counted by the certified public accountant of a company designated by the dean of the college. The system is a bit mysterious and seems to be a sacred ceremony for outsiders. In order to ensure that the nominees receive broad support, not just universal support, the college uses instant runoff voting, sometimes called priority voting, which involves several rounds and a "magic" number, in which the candidate must obtain a predetermined number of votes before being considered as a nominee. A few weeks after the nominees were announced in January, the second stage of voting began. For the final vote, all in-service or lifelong college members can vote in any category, but they are not encouraged to vote in categories that lack professional knowledge. The accountant counted the votes again.

After all the voting and statistics, the winner was finally determined, but he didn't report it to anyone. Only two accountants have seen the final results, and they have the responsibility to keep them secret before the award ceremony. The accountant will remember the winner's name, stuff two sets of envelopes, and then pack two briefcases and store them in a secret place until the day of the award ceremony. At the award ceremony, neither the members of the academy nor the producers of the award ceremony knew who would win the Oscar. Before the host uttered one of Hollywood's most famous lines, it was a complete mystery: "The Oscar ceremony …"