The Breakdown (aka my Excel skills finally put to use on something not Econ related)
The Breakdown of the Votes
Best Picture:
Total number of ballots = 57
Magic number to win = 57/2 = 28.5 = 29
The Blind Side got no number one votes, which eliminates it automatically. However, since it has no ballot to redistribute, we must eliminate and redistribute the next lowest, Avatar. Inglourious Basterds leads with 24 but is still short of the 29 (50% + 1) to win so we move to another round.
Avatar has been eliminated and its ballot was redistributed to An Education, which means the person who voted for Avatar placed An Education in their number two. Therefore, An Education went from 5 votes initially to 6 now. The films with the lowest tallies now are District 9 and Precious, both with 2 votes each so we have to redistribute those four ballots in the next round.
District 9 and Precious got kicked out. Their votes got redistributed-- 3 to Inglourious Basterds and 1 to An Education, which again means those films were their number 2 spots. Notice that An Education originally had fewer votes than Up but has now jumped ahead due to downstream placements. Next we eliminate A Serious Man.
A Serious Man's 3 ballots get redistributed to Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker and An Education. IB now has 28 votes, just one shy of 29. Now we eliminate Up in the Air.
Up in the Air's four ballots did an exact four way split to give each of the remaining films an extra vote. Inglourious Basterds has passed the 29 threshold and can officially be declared the winner. No more rounds are needed! However, if you do redistribute Up's votes and then An Education's, the final tally looks like this...
Inglourious Basterds: 40
The Hurt Locker: 17
The total for each round is ALWAYS 57.
Now for the other categories... Easy regular voting!
This was an interesting category cause it was write-in so there was HUGE spread (that would be way too big to fit into one graph). A Single Man and Star Trek tied with 9 votes each. Some of the other suggestions were: Invictus, Nine, In the Loop, Sherlock Holmes, The White Ribbon, Moon, and Fish Tank (which I believe actually does not qualify for this year). But the consensus seemed to build around these four above. They were the only ones that received more than 2 votes.
Final Oscar Counts
Inglourious Basterds - 6 (Picture, Director, Supp. Actor, Org. Screenplay, Cinematography, Sound Editing)
Up - 2 (Animated Feature, Org. Score)
Star Trek - 2 (Makeup, Sound Mixing)
The Hurt Locker - 1 (Editing)
Up in the Air -1 (Adapt. Screenplay)
An Education -1 (Actress)
A Single Man -1 (Actor)
Precious -1 (Supp. Actress)
Bright Star -1 (Costumes)
Avatar -1 (Visual Effects)
Crazy Heart - (Org. Song)
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus -1 (Art Direction)
Some More Interesting Tidbits:
++ The two most common films to be ranked in the last two spots (number 9 and 10) were The Blind Side and Avatar. A whopping 61% of ballots had The Blind Side in either the number 9 or number 10 spot and 57% had Avatar as either 9 or 10.
++ The biggest win margin was Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor. As seen above, he won by an almost 80 point margin.
++ The closest races were Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing. Up in the Air won Adapted Screenplay by just one vote over An Education while The Hurt Locker won Editing by one vote over Inglourious Basterds. Also "The Weary Kind" won Best Original Song by just two votes over "Take it All".
++ Interestingly, the film that benefited the most from the Best Picture's preferential system was An Education. It was the only film that jumped ranks in subsequent rounds, from number 4 to number 3.
Thanks for voting everyone! Hope you had fun. Maybe we can make this an annual thing.