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Enter more assumptions. I propose that the answer to the question is not American Hustle. Many people love it, but a lot of people also cannot see what all the fuss is about and think it is average. Stated differently, few people dislike Gravity or 12 Years a Slave, but some people actually do not like Hustle, so it is fair to assume it will be lower on most of those redistribution ballots than the other two.

You might ask, “What about Argo?” A lot of people liked it last year but many thought it was average and it still won. Yeah, but Argo did not live in this three-way split world - it barely had one clear competitor, let alone two, so I presume that after the first round it was already so near the 50% mark that all it took was for a handful more votes from other piles to carry it through. In other words, Argo literally could not be mathematically stopped.

Okay, so we are down to two movies. The million dollar question then becomes: of Gravity and 12 Years a Slave, what movie is likely to rank higher on the ballots that chose American Hustle first? In other words, where will the American Hustle ballots be redistributed? The shocking truth emerges: the people who pick American Hustle as their #1 movie may well control the outcome of the entire thing.

Enter the final, crucial assumption of the whole exercise: an American Hustle voter is ever so slightly more likely to pick Gravity as its next favorite than 12 Years a Slave. The basis for this theory is that, like American Hustle, Gravity can be enjoyed as a simple popcorn movie (although it is undoubtedly much more than that) and leaves viewers pretty satisfied after the credits roll. 12 Years a Slave, in marked contrast, is a much more difficult movie to stomach or even sit through, and the type of person who loves American Hustle is unlikely to think highly of 12 Years a Slave. Thus, in the final round, Gravity may even be sitting in second place, but if it is close enough to Slave, it may pull off a surprise victory.

Oh, you can fiddle with these assumptions and quickly reach a different result. You can say that an American Hustle voter will vote for a simple movie with his or her #1 pick and will get serious when it gets to #2. You can argue that 12 Years a Slave will be knocked out first and its ballots will determine the winner between the remaining two.

This whole exercise was meant to exemplify that the traditional theories used to predict a Best Picture race can be easily incorporated into the preferential ballot system. In a way, it does not matter that the Academy uses this system, because the old theories still determine how movies get ranked. In another way, preferential balloting can be of the utmost important in a close year like this one, when I believe it is entirely plausible and likely that voters may be unwilling to give a certain movie #1 votes because it is not “serious” enough, but will rank it highly anyway because it is so well-respected. The perhaps unintentional result of ranking Gravity high without giving it #1 votes is that it may still win anyway as long as it has a solid base of #1 votes.

We will never know, of course, how the actual voting shakes down, but it still makes for a rather interesting (if somewhat nerdy) conversation.

Here’s my final argument for why these theories as to why Gravity may actually win make sense. Gravity has lost the Best Picture race every time it has been up against 12 Years a Slave in a straight-up voting system. It lost the Globe, the BAFTA, and the Critics’ Choice, despite winning Best Director in all three of those contests. But all of those bodies use regular voting. Only one award precursor uses preferential voting to determine their winner. Which one? Why, the Producers Guild Award, of course. And who won that race? Well, surprise, surprise: Gravity and 12 Years a Slave tied. So, at the absolute least, the preferential ballot appears to have helped Gravity, and will likely make the Best Picture race much closer in Gravity’s favor than the repeated Best Picture losses in other contents otherwise suggest.

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