Insider's Guide: Who Decides Who Wins the Oscars?

Each spring the Academy Awards celebrate achievement in film, and put on a pretty grand show in the process. But is the Best Picture always the best picture? Below, film critic David Edelstein gives an inside perspective on the Oscar system.

So, who decides who wins the Oscars?

Edelstein: The wrong people, if you ask me. But then, I'm a critic and often question the taste of Academy voters. The Oscars can't be said to celebrate true artistic achievement, since history teems with examples of masterpieces passed over in favor of middlebrow beanbags.

Nor can it be said to celebrate commercial achievement, since it often turns its nose up at blockbusters, even good ones. (Consider 1982, when Hollywood generated two of the finest big-studio commercial entertainments of the last 25 years--E.T. and Tootsie--and the Oscar went to the square film, Gandhi.) What the Academy actually celebrates is a peculiar amalgam of qualities: artistic, commercial, gaudily inflated, and politically earnest. The "Best Picture" is meant to serve as Hollywood's poster child.

What was the question again?

Oh, yes: The people who vote are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy's Web site lists members' qualifications as follows:

"Membership in the Academy is by invitation of the Board of Governors and is limited to those who have achieved distinction in the arts and sciences of motion pictures. Some of the criteria for admittance are: film credits of a caliber which reflect the high standards of the Academy, receipt of an Academy Award nomination, achievement of unique distinction, earning of special merit, or making of an outstanding contribution to film.

"Members represent 13 branches--Actors, Art Directors, Cinematographers, Directors, Executives, Film Editors, Music, Producers, Public Relations, Short Films and Feature Animation, Sound, Visual Effects and Writers. A candidate for membership in the Academy must be sponsored by at least two members of the branch for which the person may qualify. Each proposed member must first receive the favorable endorsement of the appropriate branch executive committee before his or her name is submitted to the Board of Governors for its approval."

In the nomination process, actors nominate actors, directors nominate directors, writers nominate writers, and so on. But everyone gets to vote for the final awards.

In the parlance of the industry, the Academy demographic "skews old": Some of those who vote haven't had anything do with the business for forty years. That might be why you're apt to see old-fashioned movies like Gandhi or Out of Africa or The Last Emperor win over more radical or challenging fare.

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David Edelstein is film critic for Slate. Edelstein is also, with Christine Vachon, coauthor of Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through the Barriers to Make Movies that Matter.

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•	MSN Entertainment Guide to the Academy Awards