"There are no shortcuts to it," says Rick Rosas, one of two PricewaterhouseCoopers managing partners who supervise the process. "We go through a lot of adding machine tape."

2. One-sixth plus one vote — that's all you need. Once all the ballots have been arranged by first-place vote, an initial count is held. If any film garners one vote more than one-sixth of the total number of voters, it automatically receives a nomination, and that stack of votes is removed from play.

At this point, we probably ought to pause to explain "one vote more than one-sixth," which seems counterintuitive. If, for instance, 5,000 academy members were eligible to vote for best picture, logic would seem to dictate that 1,000 votes — i.e., one-fifth of the total — would be enough to earn you one of the five nominations.

In practice though, 834 votes would be enough to guarantee a spot, because it's impossible for five more films to receive more votes than that. If you receive one-sixth of the total votes, you could conceivably be one of the top six vote-getters; one vote more than that and you've clinched a spot in the top five.

(In real life, or at least in this year's best picture race, there are 5,798 eligible voters. If they all voted — which they won't, but let's pretend — the magic number to secure a nomination would be 967.)

3. Somebody has to like you best, or you're out. The stacks of votes belonging to films that have clinched a nomination are immediately set aside. Then the remaining ballots are resorted into the existing piles based on the voters' second-choice films.

If the second choice has been eliminated (either because it has already been nominated or because it's the film with the smallest stack of ballots — see below), the counters move down the list of choices until they find a contender still in the running.

By the way, films that don't receive any first-place votes are eliminated immediately, regardless of how many second- or third-place votes they've received.

4. Trust your feelings, Luke. With each new round, the lowest vote-getters are eliminated and those ballots redistributed into other piles. The process is repeated until only five piles — and thus five nominees — remain. "It can take as many as 12, 13, 14 rounds," says Rosas. "The larger the category and the broader the range of possibilities, the more rounds we'll need."

Some ballots will end up discarded, but the majority will wind up in one of the five piles — and in most cases, the member will have cast a vote for one of his or her top three choices. (Read on for the explanation.)

But each member will have only voted for one film — that's a crucial difference between the preferential system and a weighted system, in which a voter's first choice would receive five points, his second choice four points, down to one point for a fifth choice.

"The other system leads to a certain amount of game playing," says Davis. "The preferential system allows you to absolutely follow your instincts and not censor your preferences."

5. Tiny little pictures deserve love too. Here's an example of how the system might work. Say a member's two favorite movies of 2005 were "Cinderella Man" and "A History of Violence." Ideally, he'd like to list those films 1-2 on his ballot — but maybe he's worried that the two will both be in the running for the fifth best picture nomination, and that by listing "Violence" second on his ballot, he'll give it points that could help it secure a nomination over the movie he prefers.

Under a normal weighted system, that might happen. Under the preferential system, his vote will go to "Cinderella Man" — and it'll move to "A History of Violence" only if "Cinderella Man" is either out of the running or it has already secured a nomination and no longer needs his help.

"If you think the best picture of the year was some tiny little picture released for two weeks that nobody else saw, you might not put it on your ballot because you think you're throwing away your vote," says Davis. "But the preferential system allows you to put that picture there. If nobody else in the academy votes for it, that's okay, because they'll go down to your second choice."