For the last two years, predicting the Oscar Best Picture nominees has been particularly hard because of the new variable the Academy has added: Not only don't we know what films voters will nominate, we don't know how many.
Under new rules that went into effect last year, the total number of nominees will be between five and 10, the exact number undetermined until the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers undertake a complicated series of computations.
But if it's not possible to know for sure what the Academy will do, it is possible to run a simulation. So for the second year in a row, officials at the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which hands out the Critics' Choice Movie Awards, have allowed TheWrap to instruct the BFCA's accounting firm, CMM, LLP, in how to recount their ballots under the Oscar's preferential system.