The Skandies

For a long time, I'd look at the scoring system for the Skandies, named after Canadian cinephile, Skander Halim, and mutter at its abstruse scoring system. I could neither make head or tails of what it was doing, due, in most part, to its lack of explanation.

But this year, I finally (sadly) figured it out. The part I did know (somewhat) was the each voter had something like 100 points to allocate for each category (which includes best picture, director, actor, actress, supporting roles, screenplay, and scene). If you really, really like one role, you can give it more points. Say, you want to give 40 points to Helen Mirren, and 20 points to Meryl Streep, and 10 points to Uma Thurman, and 10 more points to Judi Dench.

The awards are then ranked from 1 to 20. But the scores are listed something like 80/5, which suggests some fraction. I realized, looking at the latest awards, that the number in the denominator doesn't matter. It's the number of voters (presumably) that gave points to that particular "award". Thus, the Skandies are a straight out, who got the most points, sorted in order. The denominator ought to play a role, but it would make it more complicated to understand the scoring.

The voters in the Skandies are a bunch of cinephiles who watch beaucoup movies. At one point, this fella in Canada tallied the results and gave out interesting stats. But that looked like a work of obsession plus compulsion, and perhaps he worked it out of his system. In the meanwhile, Mike D'Angelo has taken over that role and puts it in his "blog".

Finally happy to have figured it out and unhappy that I was so dense about it for so long.