If all goes to plan, next year’s Academy Awards will be more up-to-date and allow voters the chance to see more of the nominated movies before choosing their favorites – or, perhaps, things might just go horribly wrong, and some entirely unexpected choices might walk away with Oscars that they didn’t actually win.
The uncertainty comes from the decision, announced in a letter to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members late last week, that Oscar ballots will go digital “as early as this year, and… certainly… by next year.”
The change has been under discussion for a long time, with proponents arguing that removing the time lag associated with paper ballots – the mailing out and receiving back, tabulating the results – will allow for either an earlier ceremony bringing the annual movie award season to a much sooner close (this year’s award season ran from mid-January, with the Critics’ Choice Awards, to the end of February with the Oscars), or a later deadline for votes, allowing for voters to have more time to see the nominees and mull their decisions.
Traditionally, however, the Academy has resisted the move, citing the potential for security breaches and vote-fixing under an all-digital system. Concerns about confusing older voters who may be less likely to use computers in general were also expressed; clearly, the Academy’s thinking must have changed as the letter announcing the digital voting also says that, as soon as the digital system is up-and-running, “mailed ballots will be eliminated.”
Certainly, having the results on a computer somewhere is more open to attack and/or discovery than the traditional “The results are in this suitcase that is chained to the hand of scarily large security guards” method the Academy has used in the past – not to mention lacking a comparable sense of drama – but the Academy has, as yet, kept mum on the subject of how it plans to protect itself from vote tampering or hacks from those looking to kill with longshot bets on unexpected winners.
It’s possible that the switch to digital voting will go smoothly and uneventfully, and finally bring the Oscars into the 21st century. On the other hand, it’s also possible that this announcement is a signal that Zack Snyder’s longterm courting of the geek male demographic – which has to include some amount of halfway-decent hackers, surely – will finally pay off in the form of a shock upset as Sucker Punch takes Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay Adapted From A Hundred Randomly Selected Nerd Dreams.
At this stage, really, who can tell?