And the winner isn’t…

A hallowed institution in crisis. A nation eyes fixed on the TV as the results come in. Worries that voting rules might throw up an unpopular winner.

Sound familiar? Sadly it's not the Palace of Westminster, it's the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, home of the Academy Awards.

Change is coming to Tinsel Town. Under the old winner-take-all rules, as little as 580 of the Academy's 5800 could hand an Oscar to a complete Turkey.

‘Best' film - no mandate required.

The flawed voting we use at General Elections is infamous for excluding such cinematic greats as Alfred Hitchcock, who went to the grave Oscarless. Now Academy president Tom Sherak says he wants to "establish the best picture recipient with the strongest support of a majority of our electorate". And that has meant dumping Westminster-style voting for a ranking system - that aims to produce winners that at least most voters can agree on.

Small comfort for anyone who's seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but progress nonetheless.

They say politics is showbiz for ugly people. But the facts are that the big parties at Westminster have reached just the same conclusions as the Academy. None have deemed First-Past-the-Post ‘appropriate' for their leadership contests.

One set of rules for them, another for the rest of us.

A fair democracy isn't just for blubbing starlets or party hacks. We want the chance to chose another kind of politics. A public with a vote that counts, and MPs we can actually regard as legitimate. 

No offence to Renée Zellweger, but we can't risk the political equivalent of a Chicago win at our next General Election. We need a referendum.

PS: And if all this talk of the movies makes you want to tap your inner Traffaut, then why not enter our viral video competition