Last year I came in second in an Oscar Pool. This year I landed first place. These are the theories I use to determine who will win the Oscars:
- Momentum carries – The Academy voters are people too, and people like to pick a winner, even in the odd categories like editing, so if one movie has a lot of buzz that’s the movie to beat not just for Best Picture but for every category.
- Keep it Simple – The Academy voters are the same people trying to eek a living at this industry, so they don’t have time for deep thinking on these matters, which is why the blockbuster wins the effects categories and the period piece wins costuming.
- Stories matter – The Academy voters are people who work in the business of telling stories, they like stories, and they like happy endings, so if they can help tell one they will.
With those theories in mind I went to work:
- Momentum meant that Slumdog wins everything, except animation awards which go to Pixar and audio/visual awards which go to Dark Knight.
- But wait, simply speaking, Benjamin Button was visually epic, so Dark Knight can take sound, but Button will get the visual ones including makeup. Not costumes though, there’s a period piece in the race, The Duchess.
- With all the technical awards now determined, it’s on to telling stories with the acting awards. Heath Ledger was THE story, so that was a lock, but Kate Winslet and Mickey Rourke winning seemed like pretty good stories as well.
- And for any that didn’t fit any of the theories, (and of which I hadn’t heard of any of the movies like Documentary or Foreign Language), I turned to EW for guidance.
That’s the method put into practice. As you can see it’s not perfect (neither Mickey Rourke nor Presto won), but it worked well enough. Thanks to Stef for hosting the Oscar Pool and providing me a place to put my theories to the test.
Congrats. I kinda blew it, but that’s ok. I usually blow it because I like to think better of the voters and assume they will vote based on their own decisions and not what the steamrolling press machines tell them to do.
Scotte, I’m with you. This year it was my downfall – I picked several things that I just personally loved and hoped the Academy would too, but I should’ve stuck with Greg’s advice on the technical categories. I just loved WALL-E so much I wanted it to win more!
So, you had to pick all categories? I made some informal picks, in which I only named 11 categories (all the major ones, plus a few others including Screenplays and Editing- though really what I meant was Visual Effects, cause I wanted … Benjamin Button to win that, but didn’t know the difference at the time
)
I also picked upset winners, so some of them I got right on the second choice, but if you only count the ones where my first guess was correct, I still got 9 out of 11.
Where would that have put me in your poll?
9 out of 11 is really good, that would have probably vied for the top spot in our pool if you kept up that streak. I got 19 out of 24.
That’s the one downside, Stef, is the coldness of this method. I really wanted WALL-E to win, but learned last year that wanting Atonement to win cost me the top spot in another pool, so I tried to keep emotion out of it this year.