But what may affect who takes home the statuette is the new and complicated voting procedure instituted to deal with the extra nominees. Instead of simply listing a single top film, the Academy’s roughly 6,000 members are now required to rank them in order of preference; a result is that a film that heavily figures in the No. 2 or No. 3 spots might best one with a sprinkling of votes in No. 1  and conversely, it means that it’s important for a film to be picked for No. 2 and No. 3. (That is, unless a film has 50 percent plus 1 of the No. 1 votes, which constitutes a winning majority.)

More than anything else, “the voting system could shake things up,” said Cynthia Swartz, a movie publicist and Academy member. Some industry analysts worry that voters who had trouble picking 10 nominees to begin with will be less than conscientious about ranking them all. (Ballots with one vote will still be counted, though the Academy frowns on such an abdication of voting power.)

“People are used to voting for the movie they liked best and being done with it,” Ms. Chasen, also an Academy member, said. The new system was engineered when the Academy realized that, with 10 nominees, a small plurality of votes  less than 20 percent  could nab the big win, said Leslie Unger, a spokeswoman. The Academy even devised a new ballot, so that the staff at PricewaterhouseCoopers  those poor briefcase toters whose segment on the Oscar telecast is universally considered a good time for a bathroom break  can physically separate them into piles based on the rankings.

The arrangement, known as instant-runoff or ranked-choice voting, is a variant on the single transfer-vote system, whose real-world applications  it’s been used in Australia, San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass.  have not always been smooth. Ms. Unger said that instant-runoff has been used in the nominations process in most categories for years, so members should be familiar with it. Nonetheless, the Academy and PricewaterhouseCoopers are busy producing an instructional video to explain the nitty-gritty of choosing the year’s top film.

Glamorous, no?