As Oscar Voting Ends, Could a Pitt-Clooney Split Leave an Opening for Dujardin? Oscar ballots are due back just a few hours from now - 5 p.m. Pacific time is the Academy deadline - which means that for the next few days, the Bagger will be free to bring you utterly trifling news about green rooms and hobnobby parties, because the race is over. Kidding! We will of course at least combine the nonsense with the serious artistic talk, because the Oscars, after all, honor cinema, not just celebrity, and we like to do our part to get people interested in the craft of filmmaking. But yeah: it won't make much of a difference as far as who takes home the little gold guys. "While all studios campaign up to the last minute to try and convince Academy members to vote for their nominees, almost half of the ballots are mailed in right away," Gregory Ellwood writes at the HitFix blog. The rest of the voters may be swayed by lobbying in the form of appearances by high-profile nominees like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, hopefuls in one of the tightest Oscar races, best actor, where their popularity may engineer a split allowing someone else (voila, Jean Dujardin) to sneak in for the win. In general, though, at this stage, passion votes do not result in Academy Award statuettes, at least for best picture. As Steve Pond explains over at The Wrap, by the time the nominees get near the goal line, it's the consensus picks that rule the night. "In most cases," he writes, "a movie will need far more than the No. 1 votes from its biggest supporters. It'll need to be ranked No. 2, 3 or 4 by voters whose own top choices are eliminated. With the Academy's preferential voting system, "love "em or hate "em films have virtually no chance," he continues. Sorry, "Tree of Life" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." If you're No. 1 on the ballots of a passionate minority but No. 7, 8 or 9 on everybody else's ballot, you're never going to pick up the extra votes you need to win. Passion = nomination. Consensus = gold statuette," he concludes. That's Oscar's new math. Harvey Weinstein is unusually good at arithmetic.