Unless you happen to have a vested interest in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it’s plain to see that the Oscars are trapped in a death spiral. Viewers are abandoning the ceremony in record numbers and, after last year’s debacle – a bizarre jokeless gushfest held in a train station – it’s hard to see how they will ever return.

Fortunately, the Academy braintrust has schemed up two dramatic changes to this year’s ceremony that should help to bring things back into line. The first is that a bunch of awards won’t actually be televised live but edited into the broadcast, which will help to make the show’s runtime far less punishing. The second change, though, has already backfired.

The biggest complaint about the Oscars has always been that it celebrates a narrow stratum of middlebrow dramas that only exist to win Oscars, while anything too expensive or popular is bizarrely shunned. And so this year the Academy decided to address this by creating a new “fan favourite” category, where real people were asked to vote for the sort of films that real people enjoy. And they did this via a Twitter vote. You’re already way ahead of me here, aren’t you?

That’s right. The Oscars chose to popularise their ceremony by handing the reins over to the social media platform that once voted to call a government polar research vessel Boaty McBoatface. As such, at least as things currently stand, the #OscarsFanFavorite hashtag has become a nightmarish mishmash of bad choices, joke entries and protest votes. I say this as an impartial observer, but it has the potential to be absolutely hilarious.

In fairness, some of the films you expected to be included in #OscarsFanFavorite are present and correct. Spider-Man: No Way Home, the runaway sensation that single-handedly shocked the post-Covid box office back to life, is among the choices. As is The Suicide Squad, arguably the only other standout superhero movie of the last 12 months.

The punctuation nightmare of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tick, Tick… Boom! has also made the shortlist, presumably because it makes up roughly a third of all TikTok videos in circulation. Dune is there, too, as well as The Power of The Dog – a sign that the thinnest of slivers exists between popularity and critical acclaim.

And then we get into the weirdness. Sing 2 is the only animated film to make the cut – in the year of Encanto and The Mitchells vs the Machines – but that can probably be forgiven due to the fact that Sing 2 is a non-stop start-to-finish blast. There is also Malignant, which is essentially the scientific opposite of Sing 2. Its inclusion here is probably down to the wild plotting decisions that occur in the latter half of the movie – no spoilers here – so perhaps it gained its place as revenge for the lack of awards won by its twisty cousins Fight Club and The Sixth Sense.

Then there’s Army of the Dead. Now, Army of the Dead is not a particularly good film. It’s slapdash and forgettable, and wouldn’t normally feature on anyone’s best of list. But you know who directed Army of the Dead? That’s right, Zack Snyder. And you know who has an army of angry, revved-up keyboard warriors who still froth with anguish over the end results of Justice League? That’s right, Zack Snyder. The inclusion of Army of the Dead is a vote of a support, plain and simple. Zack Snyder could have released a YouTube video of a kitten farting into a jar this year, and it would have still made the shortlist.

The same goes for Minamata, a tiny film that has yet to make $2m. Again, Minamata is only on the list because it stars the newly “cancelled” actor Johnny Depp, a man who inspires a huge swell of support from a relatively small group of people online. A vanishingly small amount of people have actually seen Minamata, but nevertheless it exists here as a protest vote against cancellation, against Amber Heard, against the Fantastic Beasts franchise, against anyone that turned their back on Depp after a court labelled him a domestic abuser (which is to say everyone except the crew of Minamata and whoever made that perfume ad he’s in).

Weirdest of all, though, is Cinderella. Honest to God one of the worst films ever made, you suspect that Cinderella only made the list because it stars Camila Cabello, and lots of people follow Camila Cabello on social media. That can be the only logical explanation. Cinderella cannot win this vote. It must not. For Cinderella to be considered in any way a success would tear a hole in the fabric of reality as we know it. We must stop this with all our power.

Cinderella won’t win #OscarsFanFavorite, though. This is a popularity contest, and No Way Home is convincingly the most popular of the lot. Unless something terrible happens on the night, this is the way that things will go. But I hope the Academy has learned an important lesson here. As bad as your show might be, you must never ever hand the reins to the internet.