For some Oscar viewers, the excitement this year is not which movie wins Best Picture, but how it will win.

A change in the selection process this year is getting rave reviews from proponents of an alternative method of voting long favored by progressive activists.

Using so-called instant-runoff voting, members of the Academy will rank their preferences in the best-movie category, which has expanded to 10 movies for the first time since 1943.

Advocates of the system are eagerly keeping watch, hoping the red-carpet moment will bring awareness to a method of voting they say helps eliminate spoiler candidates.

"It'll get a degree of popular attention that we haven't seen," said Rob Richie, executive director of the FairVote, a nonprofit organization that since 1992 has championed election reforms such as the instant runoff.

It'll also give the public a more readily understandable example of the system, which can seem complicated when first explained.

In an instant-runoff system, voters make their second choices clear upfront. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round of voting, the contender with the fewest first-preference votes will be eliminated, just as in a normal runoff.

The second choices from those dropped voters are then added to each candidate's tally in successive rounds until one has a majority.

The Oscar buzz has already generated some coverage, with news outlets as diverse as USA Today , The New Yorker and the Huffington Post  explaining the system for movie buffs.

"Whether it bleeds from the entertainment world to the political world is yet to be seen," Richie added. "We're trying to make the connection."

The system has long been used in the Oscar nomination process. Once the nominees were determined, however, a plurality, or winner-take-all, system took over. The Academy switched because when including 10 nominees, the threshold to win could end up being 10 percent plus one vote, Richie said.

"The outcome is you can have a fractured field. You can have a quote, unquote winner who most people hate," Richie said. "You can imagine a scenario in which someone wins who is a really unrepresentative nominee."

FairVote set up a blog  to advocate for the system, enlisting as a writer instant-runoff proponent Krist Novoselic, former bassist for '90s rock band Nirvana. He said instant-runoff elections would be ideal in some municipalities where several candidates enter elections.

"We feel the need in the 21st century. People want more choices in the information revolution," Novoselic said. "I don't think the current voting system is accommodating that."

Instant-runoff elections are most notably held in Australian political elections, but some American cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Memphis and Burlington, Vt., have recently made the switch for local elections.

Whether that's a good thing depends on who you ask.

Anthony Gierzynski, a political science professor at the University of Vermont, said while the system might work for well-educated Academy voters, when applied on a broader scale, it has led to some perverse outcomes.

He noted that in a three-way Burlington mayoral race, one candidate who beat the other two in head-to-head polling ended up losing in the first round of voting. And Gierzynski added that a more complicated ballot could have the unintended consequence of alienating some voters.

"You start overwhelming voters and you start losing people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale," he said.

Activists against the system think that even as applied to the Oscars, instant runoff is a bad idea. Joyce McCloy, who blogs at NCVoter.net, said the winner is bound to cause controversy.

"There will be people that lack confidence in the outcome, because whoever gets the most first choice votes may not win," McCloy said. "Whichever movie is the most mediocre could win, because it could get the most second- or third-place votes."

But whether or not that scenario is bad is a matter of opinion. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wrote an article  explaining how the instant runoff could actually help best-picture underdog "The Hurt Locker" overtake its rival, "Avatar."

He argued that "Avatar" is polarizing: While it may get more first-place votes, it may also get more votes in the ninth or 10th slot.

"The Hurt Locker," on the other hand, could finish the first round in second place, then after dropped contenders' votes are applied, end up rising to the top of the pile on the strength of second-place votes.

To put a political face on it, Richie says this scenario might resemble the 2008 Republican primary for president, when Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) won the primary without winning a 50-percent majority in hardly any state's primary.

"Lets say he's 'Avatar' where he might have a ceiling to his support," Richie said. "And something like 'The Hurt Locker' is Mitt Romney. 'Inglourious Basterds' is like Mike Huckabee, sort of like a dark horse, where it has some people who really like it."

"Was there a ceiling to McCain's support that we never actually saw in the primary season?" Richie added.

All eyes will be on the Oscars this year to see if the scenario plays out. Unfortunately, even if it does, the Academy has already said the votes will be secret. So, much like the 2008 Republican primary, we may never know if Romney's Hurt Locker could beat McCain's Avatar.

Daniel Newhauser writes for Roll Call.

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