To my great surprise, it appears as if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uses a preferential voting system for Best Picture. Basically, you pick your top five of the nominated films. If a film doesn't gather a certain threshold of first place votes, it is eliminated and the ballot then becomes a vote for the second place film.
When you have a broad slate of candidates - as in the case for Best Picture, or any Oscar - this system is designed to select a winner who can garner the most support across a broad swath of the electorate.
So how did The Shape of Water and Green Book win, when most people agree they weren't the best pictures of the year?
Most likely, voters tend to have a favorite (maybe even The Favourite) and then a list of movies that they would be fine having win the award. Green Book is a perfectly OK movie, it seems, and was likely a lot of voters 3rd or 4th choice. But as their personal favorite (maybe even The Favourite) was eliminated, it tended to nudge the result towards a broad, bland choice.
The system sometimes works, as it did with Moonlight, but it tends to reward mediocrity and lowest agreeable candidate.
As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time."
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