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On Tuesday at 5.30am the movie industry will all be finding out exactly who is in the running for an Oscar this year. If you're anything like us you're probably wondering how the films get nominated. Well annoyingly the answer is VERY complicated, but we'll do our best to try and explain the nomination process.

This year there are 274 films eligible for the Academy Award for Best Picture and 5,777 members of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have voted for them. For their votes to be counted they had to get their ballots to the accounts PricewaterhouseCoopers by 5pm on the 23rd January .

The actual way they deal with the nominations has changed this year because instead of the usual 5 films being nominated for Best Picture, there are 10 and the nominations are worked out through preferential voting and amazingly the counting is all done by hand using piles and piles of paper taking roughly 1,700 man hours.

On the ballot the members of the Academy list ten films, but they are only really voting for one of those films... the order is important due to the preferential voting system. If a film is not ranked number one by anyone then it's ruled out of the running. So how does it work then? Take a deep breath, here we go.

The accountancy firm first take all the ballots, count them and then, using a complicated formula, work out how many votes a film will need to get it in the top 10. Once they have that magic number they put all the ballots into piles of number 1 choices. If any film has enough ballots to reach that magic number then it is a nominee and the pile is removed from the table.

They then look at the piles still left on the table and get rid of the one with the smallest amount of votes, redistributing them to other piles ranked on the 2nd favourite film on the ballots. If the number 2 choice has already been eliminated then they go to the 3rd choice and so on. Once that's taken place they count again, if a film hits the magic number it's taken off the table and is a nominee. They then remove the smallest pile and redistribute them again until they have 10 films hitting the magic number, although that magic number slightly changes with each round of voting, taking into account the number of ballots still to use and how many nominations are left. Those 10 films are then the best picture nominees.

Finally once all the nominations are in then Academy members get till 5pm on the 2nd March to pick their favourite film, which again is selected using the preferential voting system. Once those votes are in there are only two people (i.e. the two people who did all the counting) who will know the winners until Steve Martin & Alec Baldwin reveal them to the world on the 7th March.

Told you it was complicated.