(NOTE: the entire post has been updated) Ever wanted to have your say in how the Oscars turned out? Today, we begin a new series of surveys on Cinema Sight that will attempt to adjust the Academy’s results and create a new set of revisionist Oscar selections.

1996 was the year Cinema Sight (then The Oscar Guy) launched, so it seemed only fitting that we start there and work forward. If interest is strong and we get a lot of participation, we may take on the prior years as well.

To accomplish our goals, we’ll be conducting a series of surveys, one for all non-short film categories. For each survey, depending on the category, we’ll compile a list of films from various sources. Participants will then rank them in order and the five (or ten) best ranked films in each category will move on to awards voting once all base years have been completed. Two categories, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary, will use the standard calendar year instead of the Academy’s bizarre eligibility rules.

Below, you will find the specifications for where data will come from when compiling the lists. These are broken into two sets, four-source categories and two-source categories. Four-source categories are Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary Feature. All other categories will fall into the Two-Source column.

Four-Source Categories:

• The actual Oscar nominees in the selected category.
• The Top Ten eligible films at the U.S. box office.
• The ten highest-rated eligible films according to Rotten Tomatoes
• The precursor nominees and winners in the selected category.

Two-Source Categories:

• The actual Oscar nominees in the seleted category.
• The precursor nominees and winners in the selected category.

After all of the survey from 1996 to the present have been conducted, we will collect the data to create the new Oscar slate. We’ll then select the winner in each category based on the new nominations, thereby revising Oscar history.

When this post was originally written, I was planning to use Sodahead to conduct each poll. This turned out to be cumbersome and the results weren’t very helpful in determining who would be on the final ballot. Survey Monkey has the capability of setting up a list of films that can be ranked in order of preference either by changing the numbers of click-and-dragging the titles into the desired order. As such, the first week of the poll was conducted via Sodahead and the second week was done with Survey Monkey. From this point forward, we will be using that method for selection.

The first polls will start here next week.