BEST PICTURE

The academy used to like them big and stupid. But that has changed in recent years.

For most of the academy’s history, there were five nominees for best picture, and the one that got the most votes won. A movie didn’t need a majority but a plurality. So theoretically, a film could win with as little as 21 percent of the vote, so long as the other four films split the votes more or less evenly.

This is where the size of a film mattered.

A big film employs more people, and if all the people involved in an enormous-special-effects extravaganza voted for the movie that employed them, that movie would have an advantage going in.

As for stupid, the academy has always loved stupid, or at least lowbrow. Big and smart might beat small and stupid, but big and stupid was the unbeatable combination.

But then everything changed in 2009.

The academy expanded the number of nominees from five to as many as 10, and the voting method was altered to ensure that winners got a majority of votes.

Now, the voting method is complicated, but the main thing to know is that academy members have to rank their choices for best picture from first to last. The immediate result was that big, stupid movies stopped winning. In the first year of ranked voting, “Avatar,” the box-office titan considered a shoo-in, lost to “The Hurt Locker,” a film that made a modest $49 million to the billions earned by “Avatar.”

Another thing that happened is that whatever was the morning-line favorite on the day the nominations were announced tended to lose — not just “Avatar” but, in other years, “The Social Network,” “Lincoln,” “Boyhood” and “The Revenant.” What happened there is pretty obvious: People started to vote strategically.

For instance, if you wanted “Birdman” to win in 2014, you wouldn’t rank “Boyhood” in second place, even if you thought it was the secondbest movie. You would rank it last.

On that basis, “La La Land,” which has been the best-picture favorite for weeks, should probably lose. But the data — spanning less than a decade — are inconclusive, especially when we factor in “The Artist” and “12 Years a Slave,” opening-day favorites that did go on to win — in 2011 and 2013, respectively.

Plus, “La La Land” just feels like a best-picture winner, more than the other nominees. And unlike “Lincoln,” “The Revenant,” “Boyhood” and “The Social Network,” it’s not hated by people who don’t love it. Yes, some people are bothered by the fact that it’s a musical starring two people who can’t sing, but even then, no one seems angry about that. It’s a hard film to hate.

So with that in mind, we can expect the curse of the favorite to lift this year. “La La Land” will win best picture.