Nine exceptional films vie for Best Picture and RCV will see which gets to take home Oscar

The Academy uses ranked choice voting to select the award for Best Picture at the Oscars to ensure broad support for the winning film.

Last night, the steadfast viewers seeing the Oscar telecast to the end experienced a shocking moment: "La La Land" was wrongly read as the Best Picture winner, only to soon be corrected with the actual winner, Moonlight. But what we really can productively learn relates to the virtues of the ranked choice voting ('instant runoff") system used by the Academy since 2009 to elect Best Picture.

Ranked choice voting is a smart system for the Oscars to use after increasing its number of Best Picture nominees. It's not rewarding mediocrity, but at least making sure that the "passion vote" is backed up with a majority vote.

It's award season, and La La Land just picked up a big prize: the Darryl F. Zanuck Award from the Producers Guild of America (PGA). Underscoring how ranked choice voting is a smart, reliable system for handling voter choice, the PGA and Academy of Motion Pictures have picked the same winner all but one year since adopting the system

Academy Award nomination voting began Thursday, January 5, and runs through Friday, January 13. By using ranked choice voting, the Academy allows a variety of nominees to be considered--from blockbuster hits, to independent films.

Using ranked choice voting, especially when there are so many nominees, is the best way to select a film that has the broadest support among all voters. Spotlight may not have been the most talked-about film or the most divisive film, but it did earn broad enough support, perhaps in second or third choices, to clinch the victory.

For this tenure, PricewaterhouseCoopers has successfully tabulated the results and delivered the winners for the Oscars without a single breach in the secrecy of the process.

All the prominent award systems in the entertainment industry are subject to complaints about winners, nominations, and perceived snubs. The Academy Awards are no different, with particular concerns this year that all 20 nominated actors and actresses are white for the second straight year, triggering the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and commitments from The Academy to diversify the membership that votes on nominations.

The nominations for all Academy Award categories from Best Picture to Best Sound Mixing have been released. Most slates of nominees were selected using a voting system very similar to the “multi-winner” form of ranked choice voting that FairVote advocates for.