Race Ratings for the 90th Academy Awards

The Oscars are the one election that numbers still can't predict. The black box that is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn't lend itself to model-building; instead, we're forced to rely on the sleuthing and scuttlebutt of reporters with their fingers on the pulse of the electorate. I'm sorry to say that the fate of your Oscar pool rests entirely on educated guesses.

In politics, there's a place for those too. My colleagues at Inside Elections and other electoral handicappers issue qualitative predictions on a scale from "Solid Democratic" to "Solid Republican," and it's proven a useful way for politicos to easily think about and group together races of varying competitiveness. In that spirit, for four years running now, I've issued the same type of race ratings for the 24 categories at the Academy Awards. Meant to give the fairweather Oscars fan a quick idea of the state of play, they're the best way to think about who will win the big prizes on Sunday night.

Below are my ratings for the 90th Academy Awards, based on a consensus of betting markets, expert opinions, and award history. For my own personal predictions (which occasionally veer away from conventional wisdom to try to predict the inevitable upset), click here.

Best Picture: Tilt The Shape of Water
The Oscars' use of instant-runoff voting for the top prize has kept the Best Picture winner consistently suspenseful for the last several years—including when it wasn't supposed to be suspenseful at all. This year is no exception, as The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri have both won crucial precursor prizes (the Directors Guild of America Award and the Screen Actors Guild Award, respectively). Both would break Oscar precedent, as The Shape of Water would be only the second film in 25 years to win Best Picture without at least a nomination for SAG's top prize, and Three Billboards would be only the second film in 25 years to win without a Best Director nomination. I give the edge to Shape, since it has more Oscar nominations overall (13), indicating support among all of the Academy's branches, and also snagged the highly predictive Producers Guild of America Award.

Best Director: Solid Guillermo del Toro
The Shape of Water helmer won the all-important DGA Award, while Three Billboards's Martin McDonagh isn't even nominated. Once Del Toro wins, all three of the "Three Amigos"—the Mexican auteurs Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Del Toro—will have won the Best Director Oscar this decade.

Best Actor: Solid Gary Oldman
Oldman has been rewarded for his physical transformation into Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour by nearly every awards guild thus far.

Best Actress: Solid Frances McDormand
McDormand's portrayal of a justice-seeking mother in Three Billboards is Oldman's awards-circuit dominance without a Y chromosome. She's a lock as well.

Best Supporting Actor: Solid Sam Rockwell
McDormand's Three Billboards co-star seems like he will easily overcome whisper campaigns about his character's problematic arc to win Oscar gold.

Best Supporting Actress: Solid Allison Janney
There was a time when Janney and Lady Bird's Laurie Metcalf were running neck and neck here, so some might still see this as a competitive category, but since the precursor awards started getting handed out, there's really been no indication that Janney could lose. The only question now is if the I, Tonya star will rap "The Jackal" as part of her acceptance speech.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Solid Call Me by Your Name
This is an historically weak category: three of the nominees weren't good enough to score a nomination anywhere else, and the writing branch had to dig so deep that it nominated a superhero movie (Logan) for the first time in history. The contest here is between Call Me by Your Name and Mudbound; the Best Picture nominee has the clear advantage.

Best Original Screenplay: Tossup
On the other hand, because almost every prestige pic this year was not adapted, the Best Original Screenplay category is packed to the gills with talent. Get Out, the wildly original thriller with something to say about racism, and the snappy dialogue of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are locked in such a tight battle that it's impossible to say who's ahead. Lady Bird could be a dark horse, too.

Best Animated Feature: Solid Coco

Best Documentary Feature: Lean Faces Places

Best Foreign Language Film: Lean A Fantastic Woman

Best Cinematography: Likely Blade Runner 2049
The brilliant Roger Deakins finally looks lined up for his first Oscar after 14 (!) nominations, but beware: the Academy may be consciously averse to his work. He's been a frontrunner in this category at least twice before—only to be upset.

Best Costume Design: Likely Phantom Thread

Best Film Editing: Tilt Dunkirk

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Solid Darkest Hour

Best Production Design: Likely The Shape of Water

Best Original Score: Likely The Shape of Water

Best Original Song: Tilt "Remember Me"

Best Sound Editing: Likely Dunkirk

Best Sound Mixing: Likely Dunkirk

Best Visual Effects: Tossup

Best Animated Short: Likely Dear Basketball

Best Documentary Short: Lean Edith+Eddie

Best Live-Action Short: Likely DeKalb Elementary

Race Ratings for the 89th Academy Awards

You can expect an explicitly political show this Sunday at the Oscars: at other awards shows this year, virtually every winner—from the most famous actress to the lowliest techie—has let loose with their opposition to Donald Trump. So I figure it won't hurt much if I bring one other element of politics to Hollywood—election handicapping.

Political forecasting sites like Inside Elections give each race a rating on a Solid-Likely-Leans scale, and for the past few years, I've done the same with each Oscar category. The idea is to give casual awards watchers an idea of the conventional wisdom for each of the 24 Academy Award mini-races. Check out this year's race ratings below; for my personal picks (which sometimes diverge from the conventional wisdom!), click here.

Best Picture: Solid La La Land
With a record-tying 14 nominations, this modern movie musical is primed to pull off the rare Oscars-night sweep.

Best Director: Solid Damien Chazelle
La La Land helmer Chazelle won the nearly identical precursor prize, Outstanding Directorial Achievement at the Directors Guild of America Awards, virtually guaranteeing he will be the youngest Best Director winner in history, at 32 years and 38 days.

Best Actor: Tossup
The closest major race of the night pits Casey Affleck of Manchester by the Sea against Denzel Washington's self-directed effort in Fences. Affleck has been the assumed frontrunner all season, but Washington won the Screen Actors Guild Award, and actors represent the largest segment of Academy voters. If Washington wins, he would be the seventh actor to earn three Oscars—and the first African American.

Best Actress: Solid Emma Stone
Stone carries La La Land, a film we know Oscar voters love. Competitor campaigns by Jackie's Natalie Portman and Elle's Isabelle Huppert just haven't gotten off the ground.

Best Supporting Actor: Likely Mahershala Ali
Ali (whose full first name is Mahershalalhashbaz) has had a great year, starring in the Netflix shows House of Cards and Luke Cage and appearing in Best Picture nominees Hidden Figures and Moonlight. This win may be for Moonlight, but really it's for an excellent all-around body of work.

Best Supporting Actress: Solid Viola Davis
After being robbed of the 2011 Best Actress Oscar for The Help, Davis is finally back at the dance for Fences, and no one else stands a chance.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Solid Moonlight
Competitors Lion and Arrival have both won precursor awards in this category, but not while Moonlight was nominated opposite them. The consensus seems to be that Moonlight was Hollywood's second-favorite film this year after La La Land, so it's favored here, but that's more a collective educated guess than a mathematical certainty.

Best Original Screenplay: Leans Manchester by the Sea
This category is an old-fashioned horse race between La La Land and Manchester by the Sea. Manchester's script has drawn plenty of praise, and musicals have historically struggled in the writing categories. But then again, the possibility of a La La Land sweep looms large.

Best Foreign Language Film: Tossup
The German black comedy Toni Erdmann was a solid frontrunner in this category until January 27, 2017, when President Donald Trump signed his now-infamous executive order banning citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Included in the ban was Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who subsequently lacerated Trump and said he would not attend the Oscars as a result of the order. Since then, Farhadi's film The Salesman has picked up momentum in this category, to the point where many pundits now are picking it to win on a sympathy vote.

Best Animated Feature: Likely Zootopia

Best Documentary Feature: Solid O.J.: Made in America

Best Cinematography: Solid La La Land

Best Costume Design: Leans Jackie

Best Film Editing: Solid La La Land

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Likely Star Trek Beyond

Best Production Design: Solid La La Land

Best Original Score: Solid La La Land

Best Original Song: Solid "City of Stars"

Best Sound Editing: Leans Hacksaw Ridge

Best Sound Mixing: Likely La La Land

Best Visual Effects: Solid The Jungle Book

Best Documentary Short: Tossup

Best Live-Action Short: Leans Ennemis Intérieurs

Best Animated Short: Likely Piper

The Oscars Really Do Spread the Wealth Around

If it's February, it's time to indulge in hobby-making over a different kind of election here at Baseballot: the Academy Awards. Notoriously difficult to predict due to a lack of hard data and polling, the Oscars often force prognosticators to resort to fickle historical precedents, working theories, and, worst of all, gut instinct.

One of those working theories is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences likes to "spread the wealth around." The idea is that the Academy has many favorite people and movies that it would like to honor, but it only has a limited number of awards to bestow, so it tries to sprinkle them around strategically so that everyone deserving gets a prize for something. At first, it seems a stretch of the imagination to think that a disparate voting bloc could be so coordinated and strategic in its thinking. Academy members aren't making decisions as a unit; their results are an aggregation of thousands of individual opinions. However, the Academy is still a smaller and more homogenous electorate than most, and their preferences may reflect the groupthink of the Hollywood insiders who dominate their ranks. Sure enough, a dive into the data shows that the Academy may indeed lean toward distributing the wealth evenly.

One of this year's hottest Oscar races is that for Best Actor. Will Casey Affleck join the club of Oscar winners for his portrayal of a Boston janitor in Manchester by the Sea, or will Denzel Washington take home his third trophy for hamming it up in Fences? If you believe that the Oscars spread the wealth around, you'd probably lean toward Affleck—and history suggests that's a good bet. At the last 15 ceremonies, a past Oscar winner has gone up against an Oscar virgin 47 times in one of the four acting categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress). A full 32% of nominees in those 47 races were past winners, so, all things being equal, past winners should have won at around an equal rate. However, all things clearly were not equal, as those past winners prevailed just seven times out of 47: 15%. Looking at the same data another way, they won just seven times out of their 75 nominations—a 9% success rate. That's far lower than a nominee's default chances in a five-person category: one out of five, or 20%.

Some caution is still warranted, though. Oscar history is littered with famous counterexamples: the time two-time winner Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) stole Best Actress from underneath the overdue Viola Davis's (The Help) nose at the 2011 ceremony, or when Sean Penn (Milk), a prior winner for Mystic River, edged out Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler at the 2008 awards. In addition, the converse of spreading the wealth isn't necessarily true. Even if the Oscars make a concerted effort to keep extra statuettes out of the hands of people who already have them, they probably don't bend over backward to reward undecorated artists who are "due."

Finally, there may be a difference in wealth-spreading between the acting categories, where the nominees and their records are well known, and the craft categories, where the awards are thought of as going to films, not people. This can explain the wide inequalities in categories like Best Sound Mixing. Sound mixer Scott Millan has won four Oscars in his nine nominations, and legendary sound engineer Fred Hynes won five times in seven tries. By contrast, Greg P. Russell, nominated this year for mixing 13 Hours, has compiled 17 nominations and has never won. And the all-time record for most Oscar nominations without a win goes to mixer Kevin O'Connell, who is a 21-time nominee, including his bid this year for Hacksaw Ridge. Unfortunately, both will almost certainly lose this year to La La Land mixer Andy Nelson, who has two wins in his previous 20 nominations. Even if this isn't because of the longstanding trophy inequality in Best Sound Mixing, it is certainly consistent with it.

Within each ceremony, the Academy also appears to spread the wealth fairly evenly among movies. Of the last 15 Oscars, seven can be considered "spread the wealth" ceremonies, while only three can really be considered "sweeps" (2013 for Gravity, 2008 for Slumdog Millionaire, and 2003 for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King); five are ambiguous. Granted, this is a subjective eyeballing of the data, but I have some hard numbers too. The median number of Oscars won by the winningest film of the night over the last 15 years is five—a respectable total, but not one that screams "unstoppable juggernaut." Twelve of the 15 ceremonies saw the winningest film take six Oscars or fewer. Eight of the 15 years were below the average mode of 5.4 Oscars, represented by the black line in the chart below:

More stats: during the same 15-year span, anywhere between nine and 14 feature films (i.e., not shorts) per year could go home and call themselves an Oscar winner—but 10 out of 15 of the years, that number was 12, 13, or 14 films. Just five times was it nine, 10, or 11 films. Finally, at nine of the 15 ceremonies, the standard deviation of the distribution of Oscars among feature films was less than the average standard deviation, again represented by the black line. (A low standard deviation means that the values in a dataset tend to cluster around the mean—so a year when four films each won three awards has a low standard deviation, but a year when one film won 11, two films won two, and the rest won one has a very high standard deviation.)

With only three ceremonies in the past 15 years boasting significantly above-average standard deviations, it's clear that a low standard deviation is the norm—which means it's typical for more films to get fewer Oscars. In other words, spreading the wealth.

Of course, the pattern is only true until it isn't. Every so often, a juggernaut of a movie does come along to sweep the Oscars: think Titanic, which went 11 for 14 at the 1997 ceremony. This year appears poised to deliver us another of these rare occurrences. La La Land reaped a record 14 nominations, and according to prediction site Gold Derby, it is favored to win 10 trophies next Sunday. Don't let overarching historical trends override year-specific considerations, like the runaway popularity of Damien Chazelle's musical, when making your Oscar picks.

Race Ratings for the 88th Academy Awards

To win your Oscar pool, it's often not that helpful just to know who's favored. You have to really understand the race in each category—which can be hard to do, given the large number of categories and the marathon awards season that provides context for each one. In politics, we turn to election handicappers to do this for us. For the Oscars, you can turn to me.

Every year, I give each Oscar category a Cook Political Report–style "race rating" to give those who don't obsessively follow the film awards an idea of the state of the race. These are a snapshot of the conventional wisdom in each category; they're not my personal picks, which can be found here. Here are this year's ratings:

Best Picture: Leans The Revenant
Having won two of the four main precursor awards, The Revenant is probably in pole position here, but no one should be surprised if The Big Short or Spotlight walks off with the top prize.

Best Director: Likely Alejandro Iñárritu
The Directors Guild of America Award moves in lockstep with this category, and Iñárritu won it this year for directing The Revenant. Iñárritu would be only the third director to win Best Director in back-to-back years, but that's only been possible eight times—so compared to the baseline 20% chance of winning in a five-nominee category, being a recent winner has actually helped your chances historically.

Best Actor: Solid Leonardo DiCaprio
Although it's largely a myth that you're more likely to win an Oscar if you're "due," DiCaprio has so much good will and so few Oscars (zero in five past nominations) that everyone agrees it's time to just give him a damn statue already.

Best Actress: Solid Brie Larson
The 26-year-old star of Room has blown away the competition at every awards show to date.

Best Supporting Actor: Likely Sylvester Stallone
There's not a lot of data here, which makes absolute certainty difficult, but there is a general consensus that sentimentality in Hollywood will give this award to Stallone for his Rocky cameo in Creed. But other major award shows failed to nominate him at all, with the Screen Actors Guild award going to Idris Elba (not nominated for Oscar) and the BAFTA going to British stage legend Mark Rylance. Stallone is kinda like America's Rylance, I guess?

Best Supporting Actress: Likely Alicia Vikander
Vikander received raves for her turns in both The Danish Girl, for which she is nominated here, and Ex Machina. The dual roles have likewise led to confusion on the precursor circuit, allowing Kate Winslet to win a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for Steve Jobs. But with only one place to honor Vikander at the Oscars, she is likely to consolidate support in this category. Still, keep an eye on Winslet...

Best Adapted Screenplay: Solid The Big Short
Of the Best Picture frontrunners, The Big Short is an adapted screenplay, Spotlight is an original screenplay, and The Revenant didn't get a screenplay nomination at all. That makes the screenplay categories really easy this year.

Best Original Screenplay: Solid Spotlight

Best Animated Feature: Solid Inside Out

Best Foreign Language Film: Solid Son of Saul

Best Documentary Feature: Solid Amy

Best Cinematography: Solid The Revenant

Best Costume Design: Tossup

Best Film Editing: Likely Mad Max

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Solid Mad Max

Best Production Design: Solid Mad Max

Best Original Score: Solid The Hateful Eight

Best Original Song: Solid "Til It Happens To You"

Best Sound Editing: Leans Mad Max

Best Sound Mixing: Tossup

Best Visual Effects: Leans Star Wars

Best Documentary Short: Tossup

Best Live-Action Short: Tossup

Best Animated Short: Tossup

The Statistical Case for Mad Max

It’s a wide-open race for the Best Picture Oscar this year. Awards-watchers entered the season assuming Spotlight was a nominal frontrunner, but its support always seemed tepid. Now that The Big Short and The Revenant have racked up major precursor awards, the buzz has shifted accordingly.

But the uncertainty could pave the way for a winner no one saw coming: Mad Max: Fury Road. At first glance, the high-octane action flick doesn’t fit the artsy mold of the Academy, but Oscar voters aren’t a monolith. The math behind how the Academy votes for its signature awards reveals that Mad Max actually has a real shot.

The Academy’s 6,261 members are divided into 17 “branches,” each for a different profession of filmmaker: Directors, Costume Designers, Music, etc. Each branch votes for the nominees in its respective category; for example, the Documentary Branch selects the Best Documentary nominees. However, members of all branches vote on the ultimate winners of every award, including Best Picture.

Spotlight, having won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Film and received two acting nods at the Oscars, is likely popular with the Actors Branch. The actors are the largest slice of the Academy, but they still only account for 1,138, or 18%, of total membership. The Big Short's win at the Producers Guild Awards, meanwhile, signals support among the Producers Branch. At 483 members, the producers are only 8% of Academy members. And, given it won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, let's assume the Directors Branch is behind The Revenant. That’s 394 supporters for this raw Leonardo DiCaprio survival story, or 6% of the total electorate.

Where Mad Max could triumph is on the electoral strength of the craft guild voting blocs. The blockbuster is nominated for all eight craft awards—Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects. That’s an extremely rare feat, pulled off by only three other movies in Oscar history (including Titanic and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). This suggests Mad Max has supporters across all of those branches—which are ordinarily considered minor but are quite formidable as a group. Together, the technical branches combine for 1,811 members—a full 29% of the Academy.

There’s just one problem: amazingly, The Revenant is one of the other three movies that went eight for eight in technical nominations. But there is reason to believe that Mad Max’s support with technicians is stronger. The Revenant is seen as the favorite for only one craft award, Best Cinematography; it’s a long shot for the other seven. That means The Revenant is more like Master and Commander, which took home only two Oscars, than it is Best Picture–winner Titanic.

By contrast, Mad Max is favored by experts and betting markets to win six of those categories (all but Cinematography and Costume Design). If correct, that would mean Mad Max doesn’t just have support among the large technical voting bloc; it has real passion. It would put Mad Max in the company of not only Titanic, but also Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the only other movies to win six Oscars for their crafts. Those three epics are the best comps for Mad Max with respect to support from the technical branches. All three won Best Picture. No film has ever won six or more technical Oscars, as Mad Max is expected to do, and lost the big prize.

At more recent Academy Awards, we’ve also seen examples of the archetype that Mad Max represents: technically strong films that ride their broad support into the thick of the Best Picture race. At the 2013 ceremony, space stunner Gravity won five of the six craft Oscars it was nominated for, while Martin Scorsese’s Hugo won five of seven in 2011. Neither won Best Picture, but neither had the depth or breadth of support that Mad Max (expected to win six of eight) has either. Both also had the misfortune to go up against a strong frontrunner those years: 12 Years a Slave and The Artist. There is no such juggernaut this year.

Despite the relative lack of buzz surrounding the film, precedent puts Mad Max right in the thick of the Best Picture race. And conditions could finally be right for a film of its ilk to prevail. To be sure, it’s still an unpredictable Oscar season—but it’s time to seriously consider that Mad Max might crash the party.

A Layman's Oscar Briefing

Even if, like me, you enjoy politics, sometimes we all just need a freaking break to go to the movies or something. And with the 88th Academy Awards coming up, there are lots of good ones out there. Here are some random thoughts on this year's Oscar season so far (yes, another election!).

#OscarsSoWhite

When the nominees were announced last month, it was the second straight year that the Oscars were seen as unfriendly to diversity. All 20 nominated actors and actresses were white, and strong diverse contenders, like Straight Outta Compton for Best Picture and Idris Elba for Best Supporting Actor, were snubbed. Last year when this happened, I compared the Oscars' stodgy voters to the BBWAA's in the Baseball Hall of Fame election—an analogy that carried forward into this year. Like the Hall of Fame did, the Oscars eventually relented to the criticism this year and announced a series of voting reforms. The Academy (whose president, it should be noted, is a black woman) went farther than the Hall of Fame, though—much farther. It set a goal of doubling its number of women and minority members by 2020—just four short years.

Most interestingly, though, the Academy made the exact same change as the Hall of Fame did. Whereas both organizations used to allow members, once they earned the right to vote for the Oscars/Hall of Fame, to remain eligible for life, both have now changed to let only active members vote. Furthermore, "active" is defined the same way: after 10 years of inactivity, you are purged from the electorate. I really wonder if someone at AMPAS is a baseball fan.

This Year's Bridesmaids

One thing that fascinates me about the Oscars is how someone can be universally respected enough to rack up nomination after nomination but not universally beloved enough ever to win. I maintain a list of all individuals with five or more career Oscar nominations, and it reveals that some people have been nominated over a dozen times without a win. The "bridesmaids" who could walk away with their first statuette this year include:

Person	Occupation	Nominations
Roger Deakins	Cinematographer	13
Thomas Newman	Composer	13
Diane Warren	Songwriter	8
Frank A. Montaño	Sound Mixer	8
Paul Massey	Sound Mixer	7
Ennio Morricone	Composer	6
Leonardo DiCaprio	Actor/Producer	6

DiCaprio may be the only name on that list you've heard of, but his suffering is mild in comparison—only five failed nominations so far, and strong odds to win this year for The Revenant. Deakins has been a criminal omission by the Academy since his first loss for The Shawshank Redemption. Two bridesmaids face off in this year's race for Best Original Score: the prolific Newsman and the legendary Morricone (although Morricone has won an honorary Oscar). However, they go up against John Williams, who now has a career 50 Oscar nominations—second-most all time. I love Williams, but he's won five times; hopefully this year's trophy goes to one of the veterans without an award.

Also facing off will be Montaño, for mixing The Revenant, and Massey, for mixing The Martian. They'll probably both lose again, though, as Mad Max's sound mixing is heavily favored. This is sad but probably makes sense; the idea that the Academy will vote for you if you're "due" for an award is largely a myth. One bridesmaid who does stand a good chance this year, though, is Warren, who has the good fortune to be nominated alongside Lady Gaga for the song "Til It Happens To You."

My Early Predictions

This is another close, unpredictable Oscar year. Spotlight is seen as the nominal frontrunner, but I think it's weak. It lost at the Golden Globes and Producers Guild of America Awards; it wasn't even nominated by the American Cinema Editors, an important below-the-line constituency. I'd watch out for a The Big Short or even Mad Max: Fury Road upset. More on that later...

Race Ratings for the 87th Academy Awards

If somebody tells you they know what's going to happen at Sunday's Academy Awards, they're lying. At the most competitive Oscar ceremony in recent memory, there is legitimate suspense about up to half of categories—unheard of for an election so closely watched.

That means it's fruitless to give binary predictions that X will win or that Y won't (although that will never stop me from making my own personal predictions). Instead, a probabilistic forecast is the way to go. That's why, every year, I issue Cook Political Report–style "race ratings" for the Oscars—to help guide the picks of those of you who haven't been following the film awards as closely. Here is this year's snapshot of the race.

Best Picture: Tossup
It's Birdman vs. Boyhood. Birdman is the late-charging challenger and won all the major guild awards but failed to nab an important Best Editing nomination; meanwhile, Boyhood still has a strong base of support and won the BAFTA. Odds are practically even.

Best Director: Tossup
Usually the Best Picture winner also wins Best Director, but this year I've seen some Alejandro Iñárritu/Boyhood picks and some Richard Linklater/Birdman picks. Iñárritu's Birdman was more directorially stylistic, but Linklater's Boyhood is a 12-year labor of love.

Best Actor: Leans Eddie Redmayne
Birdman's Michael Keaton started the awards season as the favorite, and many (including me) still believe he could prevail. However, frontrunner status has clearly shifted toward Eddie Redmayne's flashier portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Best Actress: Solid Julianne Moore
Still Alice may not have been widely seen, but Moore has this locked up on buzz alone.

Best Supporting Actor: Solid JK Simmons
Simmons has won every conceivable precursor award for his role in Whiplash; he's had this coming since last year's Sundance Film Festival.

Best Supporting Actress: Solid Patricia Arquette
Boyhood's one certain win on the night.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Leans The Imitation Game
Whiplash is a dark horse in this category, but The Imitation Game is in pole position as the most serious Best Picture contender nominated here.

Best Original Screenplay: Leans The Grand Budapest Hotel
Unlike Best Picture, this category is first-past-the-post, which means Birdman and Boyhood could split the vote here. Many think that will clear the path for Wes Anderson to win his first Oscar, but watch out if either Birdman or Boyhood has a particularly strong night.

Best Animated Feature: Likely How to Train Your Dragon 2

Best Foreign Language Film: Likely Ida

Best Documentary Feature: Solid CitizenFour

Best Cinematography: Solid Birdman

Best Costume Design: Likely The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Film Editing: Likely Boyhood

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Leans The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Production Design: Solid The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Original Score: Leans The Theory of Everything

Best Original Song: Solid "Glory"

Best Sound Editing: Leans American Sniper

Best Sound Mixing: Tossup

Best Visual Effects: Leans Interstellar

Best Documentary Short: Likely Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

Best Live-Action Short: Likely The Phone Call

Best Animated Short: Likely Feast

Your Oscar Precedents Are Worthless—or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

I said this last year, but it's even more true now: This is the most unpredictable Oscar season in memory. After Richard Linklater's 12-year epic Boyhood swept critics' awards at the beginning of the season, it looked safely on its way to Oscar gold. But Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman suddenly scored back-to-back-to-back wins with three critical guilds—the same industry professionals who cast ballots for the Oscars. As a result, Best Picture is now a two-horse race without a favorite.

The fascinating thing about the race is that, no matter which film wins, it will break Oscar precedent in a big way. If Birdman wins, it will become the first Best Picture since Ordinary People at the 1981 ceremony not to receive a nomination for Best Film Editing; the correlation between these two categories has been one of the most ironclad pieces of Oscar wisdom in the 30 years since. If Boyhood holds on, though, it will be the first time a Best Picture winner lost all three of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award since Braveheart at the 1996 ceremony—and that was back when the award season was much longer and put over a month of distance between the guild awards and the Oscars.

My predictions/wild guesses for this year's awards will be coming soon, but for now I just want to warn anyone who thinks that their knowledge of Oscar precedent or precursors can save them in this volatile year. Comparing the 2015 Oscar season to the 1995, 2005, or even 2013 Oscar season is like comparing apples to oranges. This is because the Academy is continually reassessing how it votes. Voting for categories like Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary Feature have been opened up to the entire Academy where they had previously been restricted to the few who attended select screenings. The number of Best Picture nominees has changed, from five to 10 to a flexible number (this year there are eight). Most importantly, the Academy changed the method of Best Picture balloting in 2009 to instant-runoff voting, rather than the first-past-the-post system that allowed films to win without majority support.

If the underlying rules have changed, can we even consider it the same election as pre-2009? We can't expect precedent to hold up if the Academy doesn't even count votes the same way it has in the past. It explains why, so quickly, the old rules of Oscarology have broken down—Argo winning Best Picture of 2012 without a Best Director nomination, for instance. And when you introduce precursor awards into the equation, the opportunity for error doubles: the Oscars have changed their rules, and the precursors have too. Before 2012, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) only allowed practitioners of a specific craft to vote on that craft's award. The PGA switched to a preferential ballot for its version of Best Picture when the Oscars did, but they have stuck with 10 nominees rather than the Academy's flexible total. The SAG merged with another union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, in 2012, adding thousands of non-film voters to its electorate. The DGA's five nominees and standard vote-counting procedure once matched the Oscars exactly but now feel obsolete. Clearly, a guild or other group that may once have been a great barometer for the Academy may now reflect totally different realities, and it's all because of the rules of the election.

Rather than relying on historical accuracy, then, it may be most helpful to simply look at each precursor award side by side with the Oscars and see how much they have in common, here and now in 2015. The two main questions to ask are (1) how similar are the voting processes and (2) how much do the electorates overlap? In theory, if two elections poll the same electorates in the same way, the results will line up exactly. Our luck will never be anywhere near that good, but here's how the major precursors stack up:

SAG

% of Academy in the SAG: 20.0% (~1,200 out of ~6,000)
% of SAG in the Academy: 1.1% (~1,200 out of ~110,000)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post winner chosen from five nominees. The award is not for best film, but rather Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture—often referred to as "best ensemble."
Commentary: The SAG's top award has historically disagreed with Best Picture more often than they've agreed, and that's not surprising looking at the election specs. Although a lot of Academy members are actors, Oscar voters make up only a tiny share of the SAG, limiting the body's predictive power. The non-preferential ballot and, especially, non–Best Picture nature of the award make the election a totally different animal anyway. I wouldn't recommend even considering the SAG Award when trying to read the Oscar tea leaves; even a broken clock is right twice a day.

DGA

% of Academy in the DGA: 6.7% (~400 out of ~6,000)
% of DGA in the Academy: 2.7% (~400 out of ~15,000)
Voting Process: The DGA uses traditional, first-past-the-post vote-counting to choose among five nominees. The DGA's top award is technically for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, not best film overall.
Commentary: The DGA's election laws used to fit the Academy's exactly, before the last decade's reforms, but now they're pretty well out of sync. So even though the DGAs have the best 25-year predict rate of Best Picture (76%), its modern relevance may be limited. What it does have going for it is that the Oscar for Best Director still plays by the DGA rules, and a healthy 6.7% of the Academy are directors.

PGA

% of Academy in the PGA: 8.3% (~500 out of ~6,000)
% of PGA in the Academy: 7.7% (~500 out of ~6,500)
Voting Process: Instant-runoff voting determines the winner from 10 nominees. The award is technically the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures but is understood to be the equivalent of best film.
Commentary: The PGA is best aligned with the Academy Awards; it's the only guild to use the preferential ballot, and each electorate constitutes a healthy sample size of the other. The PGA hasn't missed a Best Picture winner since the 2009 switch in both elections to instant-runoff voting.

BAFTA

% of Academy in the BAFTA: 8.3% (~500 out of ~6,000)
% of BAFTA in the Academy: 7.7% (~500 out of ~6,500)
Voting Process: The BAFTAs use traditional, first-past-the-post vote-counting to choose among five nominees for Best Film.
Commentary: The BAFTAs have the same solid overlap with the Academy as the PGA, and it's the only industry precursor to be explicitly for the best movie of the year, so it's automatically a better bet than some of the other award shows listed here. But those election rules (so 1990s!) make them a worse precursor overall than the PGA.

Writers Guild of America (WGA)

% of Academy in the WGA: 6.7% (~400 out of ~6,000)
% of WGA in the Academy: 5.0% (~400 out of ~8,000)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post voting system. Five nominees for Original Screenplay, five nominees for Adapted Screenplay—there is no "best film" award.
Commentary: The WGA has decent overlap with the Academy's electorate, but not as strong as the PGA or BAFTA. More importantly, though, its Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay awards are rubbish for predicting Best Picture. They're not even great at predicting their counterpart categories at the Oscars, as the WGA's strict eligibility rules often disqualify major Oscar contenders, such as 12 Years a Slave last year. Like the SAG, it's best not to let these awards influence your Oscar picks.

American Cinema Editors (ACE)

% of Academy in the ACE: 4.0% (~240 out of ~6,000)
% of ACE in the Academy: 34.3% (~240 out of ~700)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post voting system. Five nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) and five nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical).
Commentary: The ACE seems like an odd guild out in this list, but just like the Best Film Editing and Best Picture Oscars, the "Eddie" for Best Edited Film is seen as a Best Picture portent. It probably shouldn't be, though, given the SAG-esque misalignment between the contests. The Eddie winner is probably a good indicator of how Academy editors think, given the large share of ACE members who are also Oscar voters. But editors are a relatively small slice of the Academy, and even if they weren't, it would serve more to influence the Best Film Editing Oscar. "Best Picture" is not what the ACE votes on, and that category at the Oscars does not use the same vote-counting process the ACE does.

Of all the industry awards, the PGA is easily the best predictor. BAFTA and the DGA aren't great but can be acceptably used with a grain of salt. The WGA, SAG, and ACE shouldn't enter your calculus. This may not square with each guild's previous correlation with Oscar, but it's what makes sense among new voting realities. This is because it's not that the Academy ever looked to these groups—and, say, the DGA more than the PGA—for cues on how to vote. As In Contention's Kris Tapley quite astutely put it, the guild awards don't affect Oscar voting; they merely reveal sentiments and opinions that are already there. These guilds are the closest thing we get to polls of the Oscars, which unfortunately—and inexplicably—don't exist. A poll's past record of accuracy is worthless without the correct methodology, and so it is with Hollywood's awards.

A First Glance at February's Big Election

Every year around this time I take a brief respite from politics and baseball, where it's slow season, and dip my toe into the deep, deep pool of Oscar-watching. Keep checking this space and my Twitter feed for occasional commentary, including my final predictions right before the Academy Awards ceremony on February 22.

For now, though, just a few observations of interest on the initial state of play. Always of interest to me is which nominees are the most "due" for an award; last year, I wrote about some of the most long-suffering Oscar bridesmaids in history. This year, as I updated my comprehensive list of everyone in history with five or more Oscar nominations, I identified plenty of people who have been to the dance before—many times—but come away empty-handed. The following 2015 nominees are still looking for their first Oscar:

Person	Occupation	Nominations
Roger Deakins	Cinematographer	12
Alexandre Desplat	Composer	8
Diane Warren	Songwriter	7
Daniel Sudick	Visual Effects Artist	7
Frank Montaño	Sound Mixer	7
Paul Thomas Anderson	Director/Writer/Producer	6
Wes Anderson	Director/Writer/Producer	6

Unfortunately, as I found in my study last year, the idea that the Academy notices when you are "due" and throws you a sympathy Oscar is largely a myth. And lo and behold, none of the above people is favored to win this year; the reality is, except in the acting categories where nominees are truly brand names, voters go for the movie or the body of work, not the person.

Another angle that catches my attention more than you'd think is the politics of the Oscar race. Yes, even (especially?) Hollywood can't rid itself of politics completely. This year, two films have been appropriated by the left and the right and used as weapons in bringing their war to a new theater (no pun intended)—Selma and American Sniper. Selma, one of the best-reviewed films of the year, looked to be an Oscar frontrunner—but that made it an easy target for negative campaigning, as much a staple of Oscar season as of electoral politics. One of the oldest negative campaign tricks in the Oscar playbook is to make an issue of a film's historical accuracy. What had been done before, successfully, to Zero Dark Thirty (that film managed to win just one Oscar, a tie for Best Sound Editing), happened to Selma when various corners accused its director of making President Lyndon B. Johnson out to be a villain. "The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season," Johnson loyalist Joseph A. Califano Jr. wrote in the Washington Post. Despite the movie's liberal alignment, this perceived criticism of a white Democratic president ("white Democrats" basically are Hollywood) stopped the movie's awards campaign in its tracks. When Oscar nominations were announced, Selma received just two: Best Picture and Best Original Song.

A lot of Selma's late momentum instead went to another Christmas release: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, which appeals to a very different (read: conservative) demographic. Despite mixed reviews, criticisms that it glorified war, and questions about its own historical accuracy, Sniper was nominated for six Oscars, including one that probably came at Selma's expense (Best Actor for Bradley Cooper). The combination of Selma's snubs and Sniper's success on nominations day inspired a new wave of frustration with the Academy's demographics: 94% white, 77% male, a median age of 62. None of the 20 nominees for acting were minorities, and none of the 15 nominees for directing and writing this year were women.

These stats, and the fact that American Sniper is clearly more liked among Academy voters than we previously thought, have caused many to see it as a serious threat to win Best Picture. Sasha Stone, the prominent Oscarologist behind the blog Awards Daily, is a noted preponderant of this theory. But in my opinion, Stone (a vocal critic of the Oscars' white- and male-centric tendencies) is letting her cynicism cloud her predictions. As we sit here on January 20, Sniper is at the peak of its power—coming off the high of six Oscar nominations and a box-office-busting $108.7 million opening weekend. Sniper benefited in the nominations stage from flying under the radar and thus not attracting a loud negative campaign, but now that it has asserted strength in the race it appears that the backlash is beginning. "A week is a long time in politics," the saying goes, and it's no different in an Oscar campaign. There are three of those weeks left until Oscar voters even start voting, and five weeks until the awards ceremony. I'll be surprised if Sniper still looks this strong after taking Selma-level criticism and, probably more importantly, seeing other films take their turns in the sun as films like Boyhood (my Best Picture pick) win important precursor awards like the Producer Guild Awards.

It's also mathematically very difficult for a film as polarizing as American Sniper to win Best Picture. For their top award, the Oscars use instant-runoff voting, which allows voters to rank their preferences; if a voter's top choice is eliminated, their vote gets redistributed down to their second or third choice. This rewards films that are broadly liked, which I doubt American Sniper is; as Grantland's Mark Harris pointed out, the film's association with conservative values (a narrative that has been everywhere this weekend) probably won't do it any favors. For every Jacksonian voter who ranks American Sniper first on their ballot, there is almost certainly a Democrat who will rank it last. At the end of the day, I predict Sniper will win the two awards usually won by war/action movies: Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The result will be what everyone might have expected six months ago, and when we look back at this Oscar season, it will seem like an unremarkable achievement, hardly driven by a hidden conservative agenda.

However, that doesn't mean we should go on ignoring Hollywood's diversity issue. I'll bring it full circle here with a shared suggestion for both the Academy and the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), the slow-to-evolve body that elects players to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Both the Academy and BBWAA are showing why lifetime membership and lifetime voting rights may not be the best idea anymore in a rapidly changing world. In the film industry (as in every industry), demographics are changing and bringing more women and minorities into prominent roles, yet the older generation of filmmakers are still voting strong in retirement. In the BBWAA, retired baseball writers still vote for the Hall of Fame without even considering new approaches, like sabermetrics, that have fundamentally changed how we assess baseball in the 21st century. Both organizations are also too slow to accept new members and give them a vote in their high-profile elections. If either organization would like to get with the times and avoid all this bad press—and they should—it's time to make their voting pool reflective of the new age we live in.

Always a Bridesmaid, Never an Oscar

When Roger Deakins and Thomas Newman attend the 86th Academy Awards tonight, you'll excuse them for feeling a little déjà vu.

Both have been here before—many times—and come home empty-handed. Deakins, who shot Prisoners this year, now has 11 Oscar nominations but has never taken home a trophy. Newman, the composer for Saving Mr. Banks, is on his 12th nomination without a win. And they're just the most extreme examples of this year's nominees waiting to hear their names called for the first time: Lone Survivor sound designer Wylie Stateman is on his seventh nomination; five others, including Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who in my opinion is already due an Oscar for some of the finest cinematography ever in Children of Men), are staring an oh-for-six in the face.

In addition to being really unfortunate for the nominees, this is also relevant information in the neverending quest to predict the Oscars. Many pundits look at longtime losers and give them higher odds of winning, thinking they are "due." The law of averages may be a fallacy, the logic goes, but Oscar voters nevertheless feel sympathy for these perennial bridesmaids, throwing them an Oscar as a kind of lifetime achievement award.

If this is the case, though, how have we ended up with people on their 11th and 12th winless nominations? The "due" argument didn't ring true to me, so I decided to canvass past Oscar results to see if it held any water. It turns out not only that nominees are no more likely to win coming off a losing streak, but also that their chances actually decrease the more the Academy rejects them.

It's a strange paradox. Receiving nomination after nomination suggests that you're an Academy favorite; if anything, that should lead to a better-than-average win rate. But for this exclusive club—people with at least five Oscar nominations in competitive categories—it doesn't always work out that way. The table below shows how many people with at least a certain number of Oscar nominations—let's call the number n—were still winless when they received that nth nomination. The table also compares this to what we would statistically expect, if Oscar winners were chosen completely at random (given that most categories have five nominees per year, "random" is defined as everyone has a 20% chance of winning—and an 80% chance of losing).

For five-, six-, and seven-time nominees, fewer go winless than we'd expect, thanks to high win rates among less veteran nominees. But as the table shows, and as the graph below brings into sharp visual focus, the actual winless percentage quickly overcomes the theoretical winless percentage as we look at Hollywood's most-nominated elite.

Here, then, is the paradox: after a certain point, continuing to get all that recognition in the form of nominations—yet continuing to lose on Oscar night—actually starts to suggest that the Academy is pointedly not voting for you. Your chances start to shrivel up as early as the 0-for-5 "milestone"; people entering their fifth or higher nomination without a win have historically won that nomination just 13.8% of the time. As you'll see in the table below, that's inflated because nominees have still found success at levels like their sixth and eighth nomination. Someone doesn't truly hit rock bottom until they achieve 10 nominations and zero wins; people on their 10th or higher nomination who haven't won an Oscar by then have only triumphed 6.9% of the time (six out of 87 tries).

The win rate jumps around a lot because of small sample size, but on the whole it's not pretty—certainly below the randomized 20% benchmark in most cases. The sixth- and especially eighth-nomination win rates are interesting anomalies, suggesting there is a last-gasp window for perennial Oscar losers to prevail before being cursed to double-digit oh-fers. The average win rate on the sixth nomination feels like it is early enough to still fall into the random variance of non-veteran nominees—in other words, it's conceivable that someone could make it to five winless nominations not by being repulsed by voters, but rather just through random chance...and then their turn comes in Round Six. This is the escape hatch through which Lubezki is expected to drop when he wins his first Oscar tonight—and it's why his four other fellow 0-for-5ers have a fighting chance tonight where Deakins and Newman (more on them in a second) do not.

Meanwhile, the high eighth-nomination win rate is driven by an excellent 50% (four out of eight) win rate among actors and directors on their eighth nod without a win—without which this percentage would fall to a below-average 18.9% (seven out of 37). On this, I am open to the theory that Academy voters do throw sympathy votes to famous nominees who are overdue for an award. Acting and directing Oscar nominees are household names, even outside of Hollywood; others, such as sound designers and cinematographers, are decidedly not, even inside Hollywood. Justly or unjustly, it is possible that Oscar voters just don't notice when technical crewmembers go winless, but the omission is far more glaring when it's an auteur or superstar. Eight nominations may simply be the breaking point for this kind of glare. The jury is still out for sure, however, because four in eight is far too small a sample to draw meaningful conclusions from.

There is also some suggestion in the data that, for extremely unlucky nominees (those on their 18th or 19th nomination, or worse, without a win), voters finally do wake up and throw them sympathy Oscars. (Perhaps it just takes 10 or so extra nominations before the media gives the same kind of attention to winless mortals as winless celebrities.) People on the 19th nomination or higher without a win have a 33.3% success rate—two out of six, in absolute terms. However, because of the small sample size at these high altitudes, we cannot be sure if this holds any statistical significance.

Still, overall, people who we would see as "due" for an Academy Award actually fare very poorly. Again, it's particularly evident from the table how the win rate really craters around 10 winless nominations. Returning to the original point of this post, it's bad news for Roger Deakins and Thomas Newman, who fall exactly within the dead zone. People in Deakins's position have historically won just 7.1% of the time, and those in Newman's have in fact never gone home happy. Suffice it to say, you should not be picking either of them in your Oscar pool on the basis that the Academy considers them due. And, appropriately, both of them are considered extreme longshots by pundits to prevail tonight.

Clearly, serial losing is not a coincidence; it suggests there's something about you the Academy doesn't want to vote for. Yet it remains a familiar refrain among Oscar prognosticators that a nominee will win because he or she is due. Occasionally, being due even boosts a nominee's odds of winning in the eyes of the public. But it is just not a valid argument for saying someone will win.

In baseball, if you have an .000 batting average, the smart money for your next at-bat isn't on you getting a hit; more likely, you're just a really terrible hitter. It's no different when it comes to the Oscars. Once you hit 10 nominations and no wins, it's valid to start telling yourself, "They don't like me. They really don't like me!"

Race Ratings for the 86th Academy Awards

Although they don't get a lot of attention in Washington, DC, the Oscars are still an election. I'm attracted to them for a lot of the same reasons I am politics, but I admit they can be inaccessible for the uninitiated. First and foremost, it just isn't any fun to follow elections where you don't know what's going on. In politics, this is a problem fixed by people who handicap elections for us and provide the proper context: the Cook Political Reports of the world. If only someone would do that for the Oscars.

Well, luckily, I've been following this year's Oscars race as closely as if they were a Colorado recall election. Below are my own Cook-esque "ratings" of each of the 24 Oscar races—complete with "leans," "likelies," and "tossups." Now, note that these represent not my personal picks (which in some cases differ), but rather my view on where the conventional wisdom lies for each category. My hope is that, when you tune into the Oscars on Sunday night, these ratings serve as a viewers' guide to how well the night is staying on script.

Best Picture: Leans 12 Years a Slave
On a night that should otherwise feature few surprises, this may very well be the most competitive Best Picture race in years. 12 Years a Slave is seen as favored, but quite a few pundits (myself included) are picking Gravity, and American Hustle was also seen early on as a potential dark horse.

Best Director: Solid Alfonso Cuarón
Cuarón faces no realistic competition. His Gravity was so technically heavy, and reliant on his vision, that no one in Hollywood doesn't think he deserves this.

Best Actor: Solid Matthew McConaughey
The star of Dallas Buyers Club has swept the precursor prizes, although at least one pundit is picking Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street. But there's no reason to think McConaughey has slipped up or done anything to cough this up.

Best Actress: Solid Cate Blanchett
Not even the controversy surrounding Woody Allen can screw this up for Blanchett.

Best Supporting Actor: Solid Jared Leto
Leto's performance as a transgender AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club is the stuff Oscar loves. If Michael Fassbender hadn't refused to campaign for his role in 12 Years a Slave, we might have had a race, but he did and we don't.

Best Supporting Actress: Likely Lupita Nyong'o
The one acting category that's even remotely competitive. This looked safe for Nyong'o for a long time, but Jennifer Lawrence has picked up steam in some observers' eyes, and momentum is important in Academy races.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Solid 12 Years a Slave
An easy win for the Best Picture favorite in a race where it doesn't have to face its two biggest rivals, neither of which qualified in this category.

Best Original Screenplay: Tossup
This is a good old-fashioned horse race between American Hustle and Her—the former the Best Picture juggernaut, the latter the quirky low-budget film this category loves.

Best Animated Feature: Solid Frozen
Or Frozen solid. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Best Foreign Language Film: Likely The Great Beauty

Best Documentary Feature: Leans 20 Feet from Stardom

Best Cinematography: Solid Gravity

Best Costume Design: Leans The Great Gatsby

Best Film Editing: Leans Gravity

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Solid Dallas Buyers Club

Best Production Design: Likely The Great Gatsby

Best Original Score: Solid Gravity

Best Original Song: Likely "Let It Go"

Best Sound Editing: Solid Gravity

Best Sound Mixing: Solid Gravity

Best Visual Effects: Solid Gravity

Best Documentary Short: Solid The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Best Live-Action Short: Leans The Voorman Problem

Best Animated Short: Solid Get a Horse!

How a Rookie Beats America's Sweetheart for Best Supporting Actress

One week from Sunday is the least transparent election of the year: the Academy Awards. Like every year, most of the winners are foregone conclusions—including Best Actor (Matthew McConaughey), Best Actress (Cate Blanchett), and Best Supporting Actor (Jared Leto). One category, however, where there is some suspense is the fourth acting category: Best Supporting Actress.

The category pits 12 Years a Slave's Lupita Nyong'o, in her first film role, against last year's Best Actress champ, Jennifer Lawrence, in American Hustle. To the naked eye, it looks like a mismatch: Lawrence is the most beloved person in Hollywood these days, and her film is the most nominated this year, with 10 nods.

But in a twist, Oscarologists overwhelmingly predict Nyong'o to prevail on awards night—and it's actually not as crazy as it sounds. The merits of their performances aside, the numbers—that is to say, statistics from Academy Award history—are on Nyong'o's side.

Two factors are seen as potential impediments to Nyong'o. The first, of course, is that she's a rookie; why would the Academy honor a performer who hasn't paid her dues? However, Oscar actually has loved debutantes in the past. A full 73 actors and actresses have been nominated for an Oscar in their first film role, and 16 of them ended up taking home the gold. That's a 21.9% success rate—not statistically dissimilar from the straight 20% odds that a nominee carries into a category with five nominees.

The second potential obstacle is, sadly, Nyong'o's race. The Academy is overwhelmingly old, white, and male—in other words, the most conservative demographic group. In the past, they have been perceived to shy away from voting for diversity (think Meryl Streep over Viola Davis in 2011 or Crash over Brokeback Mountain in 2005). But that's not exactly a fair charge. In the acting categories at least, black nominees have also triumphed at just about average rates. In fact, their 22.2% success rate (14 wins in 63 nominations) is even better than the flat one-in-five odds.

One piece of Oscar conventional wisdom is supported by the numbers, however—but it's a point against Lawrence. Academy voters like to spread the wealth and usually avoid granting a performer two Oscars in a row. Lawrence, as a winner last year for her role in Silver Linings Playbook, is thus at a disadvantage here, at least if history is to be trusted. Of the 32 opportunities actors have had to win two Oscars in a row, it's only happened five times over the years; that's a below-average success rate of 15.6%.

Those who aren't following the Oscars closely this year may think Lawrence looks like a lock in theory. But a Nyong'o win is backed up by both anecdotal and empirical evidence. Don't let an uninformed assumption ruin your Oscar pool this year.

And the Award for Most Controversial Election Goes To...

A slow news day can be a painful thing. On Thursday, January 16, it resulted in something very dangerous indeed: the baseball media commenting on the Oscar nominations, announced at 8:30 that morning. While I'm already not that curious what Dan Shaughnessy has to say about American Hustle, what actually happened was arguably worse: writers began to draw parallels between the Academy Award voting process and the Baseball Hall of Fame. A sampling:

I hope @MrBrianKenny can work up some righteous indignation about these Oscar nominations. Not seeing a lot of transparency in process!

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 16, 2014

Oscar nominees announced. Cue the outrage over the voting process! Did anyone put an inferior movie on their ballot? C'mon Twitter! #sarcasm

— Tyler Kepner (@TylerKepner) January 16, 2014

(And yes I know HOF voting process can and should be better. Just funny how it's the only non-political election anyone complains about.)

— Tyler Kepner (@TylerKepner) January 16, 2014

A few weeks after the Hall of Fame election unleashed perhaps baseball's greatest internecine vitriol yet, some BBWAA members were clearly still smarting. The Hall election that they administer has come under attack for both its results and its process, and many voting members got defensive about it. What this Oscar comparison revealed is that they clearly think they are being singled out for criticism—with the implication that this is unfair. The BBWAA's sins are no worse than any other imperfect voting system, they believe, yet baseball's zealots attack them with unprecedented nastiness that's disproportional to the severity of the crime. Why can't we all just get along like those nice people in Hollywood?

It's hogwash. Because anyone who uses the Oscars—the Oscars–as an example in their argument that the Hall of Fame gets exposed to an undue amount of criticism is not a very close watcher of Hollywood's awards season.

The Oscars, of course, are second-guessed all the time—not just by fans, but by the media and blogosphere too. People are still fuming about Crash's defeat of Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture of 2005, and accusations of racism flew after Meryl Streep defeated Viola Davis for Best Actress just two ceremonies ago.

But that's just the results.

People in the Oscar-watching business have the same complaints about their voting process as baseball observers do about the BBWAA's. The difference has been—are you sitting down for this?—the Academy has actually listened and changed its voting process in response.

Probably the best example of this happened two years ago when controversy erupted over the Best Original Song category. Across all of 2011, the Academy's music branch found just two songs worthy of nominations, despite a long list of excellent qualifiers. Having just two nominees in a category and at an awards show more accustomed to five was an embarrassment for the Academy, and sharp criticism of the music branch's convoluted nomination system flew in from all sides. Within a few short months, the Academy announced that it would throw out the old process and switch to a simple new method: the five songs with the most votes would get nominations. It wasn't hard, and no one felt like it undermined tradition. The following year, Adele's "Skyfall" bested four other solid nominees in the category.

What's that? Best Original Song doesn't have the same prestige and tradition around it as, say, Best Picture? Well, the Academy has futzed with that award too—probably more than any other. Prior to the 2009 Oscars, the Academy stirred the pot by announcing it would double the number of Best Picture nominees—and change their method of choosing a winner from first-past-the-post to instant-runoff voting. The changes were a response to criticism that smaller, independent films with strong but not widespread followings were being crowded out of the Best Picture race by the Hillary Clintons and Mitt Romneys of the race that had the resources to compete. The Oscars had always been a competition with five contestants—not only for Best Picture, but to this day that remains the number of nominees in almost every Oscar category. Yet the Academy wasn't afraid to mess with tradition to make their process better.

Two years later, the Academy tweaked the process again based on feedback and perceived issues with the new Best Picture experiment. Currently, instead of forcing 10 Best Picture nominees in a year that might not merit it, the Oscars' nomination system is flexible enough to produce anywhere from five to 10 nominees. The modified instant-runoff voting system is complex but ingenious. Imagine that—a group always striving to improve its election process, even at the edges. The Academy has a very instructive lesson for the BBWAA here: if you change your process and don't like it, you're not stuck with it. Every change can be a learning experience, and you have as many tries as you need to get it right.

Finally, the Oscars are continually adding and reinventing categories as needed. The award for Best Makeup was created in 1981 as a direct result of the outcry over The Elephant Man's (1980) lack of recognition for what was obviously to so many an award-worthy makeup job. An award for Best Animated Feature was added for 2001 in order to address the Academy's longstanding anti-animation bias. Today, there are movements afoot to add categories such as Best Casting, to split categories such as Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and to combine categories such as Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing.

So, no, the Hall of Fame is not the only non-political election that people complain about. Within the baseball universe, people hear incessant complaints about baseball's election process; in the blogosphere of Oscar watching, the chorus for change is equally loud. So it is within any industry, really—from similar crowd-pleasing rules changes at the Emmys to choosing the next monarch of England. The BBWAA simply thinks they're alone in receiving criticism because they're not plugged into any of these other circles. Maybe if they were, they'd learn a valuable lesson: other organizations bend under the weight of public pressure to improve—and almost none are worse off for doing so. If the BBWAA is upset because it feels like it is the only election that people hurl their invective at, maybe they should also consider that theirs is also the only election that refuses to evolve.

Oscar Categories Ripest for an Upset

We have a highly unusual Oscar season on our hands. To start, the Best Picture frontrunner—the Iranian-hostage thriller Argo—doesn't make any sense. Argo is looking to become the first movie since Driving Miss Daisy (1989) to win Best Picture without even being nominated for Best Director. Stranger still, Argo could become the first film since Grand Hotel in 1932 to win only one Oscar—the one for Best Picture.

Indeed, it is an award season without much precedent. Last year, in my Academy Awards analysis that ended up getting every single category wrong, I tried to match up which categories track well with which other categories in terms of both wins and nominations. As Argo implies, that approach is pretty much out the window this year. Based on the other trick that Oscar prognosticators use—precursor awards like the Golden Globes and SAG Awards—a modest favorite has been identified in almost every category, but because of the lack of any historical support for many of the nominees, there is a sense that many of these favorites could be subject to upsets. (Or, after all this uncertainty, they could also all just win. That would be a bit of an anti-climax, though.)

So, this year, I figured I would take a look back at recent Oscar history and examine the circumstances that usually surround Oscar upsets—in essence, to see whether we can predict the unpredictable. Indeed, literally every single year, there is at least one category where the widely acknowledged favorite falls flat on its face.

According to my analysis of the past 10 Oscar ceremonies and pundit coverage thereof, the category that has ruined the most Oscar pools is Best Cinematography. A whopping six out of 10 times (in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011), the conventional wisdom has been wrong about this award—so much so that you might actually be better served betting against this year's favorite, Life of Pi. Interestingly, most of these upsets may be explained by an aversion to two specific cinematographers: Roger Deakins and Emmanuel Lubezki. Between them, Deakins and Lubezki share 15 Oscar nominations without a single win, despite being heavily favored to take home the gold in 2005 (Lubezki, Children of Men), 2007 (Deakins, No Country for Old Men), 2010 (Deakins, True Grit), and 2011 (Lubezki, Tree of Life). Deakins is nominated again this year for lighting the brilliantly shot Skyfall, but that film is seen as a distant second in the race. Furthermore, Life of Pi is shot in 3D, which has done well in this category recently (Avatar, Hugo). Although these are typically famous last words in this category, I don't expect an upset here.

Next, Best Original Song has produced four upsets in the same time frame, though none since 2006. In 2002, Eminem's "Lose Yourself" beat Bono's "The Hands That Built America"; in 2004, "Al Otro Lado del Río" triumphed amid a murky field of superstars; in 2005, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" capitalized on a vote split between "In the Deep" and "Travelin' Thru"; and in 2006, "I Need To Wake Up" beat a triad of Dreamgirls melodies. What these upsets teach us is that the Academy isn't afraid to honor random films in this category; none of those films was nominated in more than one other category. It also demonstrates a perhaps surprising proclivity for hip hop. Neither of those criteria is particularly helpful in predicting this year's winner, but it's worth noting that Skyfall, the strong frontrunner here, has four other nominations this year. If Adele somehow loses for that title song (which I doubt), perhaps Ted's "Everybody Needs a Best Friend" best fits the upset bill?

Best Adapted Screenplay also has a 40% rate of surprises. The most recent came in 2009, when Precious upset Up in the Air; before that, you saw three straight surprises in 2002, 2003, and 2004. The common thread here may be that Adapted Screenplay can be more like Original Screenplay than it's given credit for. Often, the award for Best Original Screenplay goes to the year's funky, scrappy, original film as a sort of consolation prize—the Academy seems to be saying, "Well done. You deserve something, but you're not mainstream enough to be Best Picture." (Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Juno, and Midnight in Paris.) In Best Original Screenplay, this attitude is usually foreseen by pundits, so it never turns out to be an upset. But in Best Adapted Screenplay, pundits continually choose one of the top two Best Picture contenders—yet this is wrong almost half the time. Sideways in 2004 (a comedy that fits the Original Screenplay profile perfectly) and 2002's The Pianist (which turned out to be beloved by the Academy, winning three major awards) stole this Oscar away from the eventual Best Picture winner, also nominated in the category. This year, Argo—and secondarily Lincoln—are the Best Picture favorites and thus the favorites to win Best Adapted Screenplay. However, recent history suggests that there's a coin flip's chance that the statue will go to comedy Silver Linings Playbook. There is a strong contingent of voters that love it, as evidenced by its eight nominations, and Argo and Lincoln could split the vote. Silver Linings also won this same award at the BAFTAs last weekend, a major precursor indication.

Four categories experienced upsets in three of the past 10 years: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, and Best Editing. Given its reputation for upsets, it will actually probably surprise many close Oscar watchers that Best Foreign Language Film is, at best, the fourth-most volatile category. It has this reputation thanks to an unusual voting requirement that winnows the voting pool to a much more select few than in most categories—making it more unpredictable. Another category that has used the same system over the past 10 years (although this year it is opening voting to the entire Academy membership), Best Documentary Feature, also had only two upsets during that time. While there have been high-profile losses in Best Foreign Language Film before (The White Ribbon in 2009; Waltz with Bashir in 2008; Pan's Labyrinth in 2006), they're just not that much more common than in "normal" categories. Therefore, I fully expect Amour and especially, with the Documentary democratization, Searching for Sugar Man to conquer their respective categories.

The other three three-fers aren't particularly noteworthy, as we are getting into the zone where categories aren't particularly unique (or prolific) in their upset tendencies—it's just random variation and luck of the draw. In Best Sound Editing, two of the three times when the winner came as a shock (2007 and 2009), it was when pundits were predicting a split with Best Sound Mixing—but instead the same film won both awards. This shouldn't be surprising, since the Academy as a whole tends to be pretty ignorant about the sound categories, especially the difference between mixing and editing. Upsets can therefore occur when they confuse the two and just mark the same film on their ballot twice. This year, Les Misérables is leading the field in Sound Mixing, but that's no help for predicting Sound Editing—Les Misérables isn't nominated there!

It is also worth a mention that Academy voters seem to dislike Alexandre Desplat, whose two regal go-arounds as the frontrunner for Best Original Score (The King's Speech and The Queen) both saw him go home empty-handed; he was beaten by more experimental fare (The Social Network and Babel, respectively) both times. Desplat is nominated this year for Argo, so don't count on a win here for the Affleck film; the haunting Life of Pi is the favorite anyway.

As for Best Editing, action films tend to win this category overall, and two-thirds of the upsets were indeed action films (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in 2011 and The Departed in 2006). However, the other third was The Aviator defeating the more action-y Million Dollar Baby in 2004. With the action-packed Argo the frontrunner in this category as well, it seems safe, unless Zero Dark Thirty can knock it off its perch.

All other categories (excepting the shorts, for which not enough information was available to analyze) have had only one or two upsets over the years—a pretty normal tally, since pundits can't be right all the time. (An interesting footnote is that, technically, there has not been an upset victory in Best Costume Design for the past 10 years. However, all you have to do is go back to last year, when the race was too close to call, to see the limitations of this stat; there can't be an upset if there is no favorite!)

When we get to this level, perhaps we're better served looking at the circumstances when an upset has occurred rather than the categories it has occurred in. One easily discernible pattern is when a candidate garners a last-minute surge in support. Therefore, it can be instructive to see who appears to be gaining momentum in the last days before the ceremony; if someone goes from a long-shot to a dark horse in the last week, they may peak at just the right time and end up taking home the prize. (It's the exact same phenomenon as last year's Iowa caucuses, when Rick Santorum entered the final weekend surging, but still behind, in the polls but ended up winning the state by 34 votes.) The classic example of this comes from the 2005 awards, when Crash was perceived to have pulled into a tie with Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture; it ultimately triumphed, of course. It's also thought that Eddie Murphy's extremely salient role in Norbit turned off Academy voters so much that they turned around and gave his 2006 Best Supporting Actor trophy (for Dreamgirls; it would have been well deserved) to Little Miss Sunshine's Alan Arkin. And, going back farther, Russell Crowe's boorish behavior probably created a backlash that caused the heavy 2001 Best Actor favorite to succumb to Denzel Washington. Unfortunately, however, these trends are much harder to identify in the technical categories, which are seldom subject to such trackable, day-by-day gossip.

Surprises also often happen when a category is a total tossup, allowing a third candidate to take advantage of the opening created by so many split voters (again, you're probably familiar with this from politics). This happened most memorably at the 2002 ceremony, when an undercurrent of support for The Pianist was able to break through in the Best Actor category (split down the middle between Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson) and Best Director category (Rob Marshall and Martin Scorsese). Likewise, controversial director Tim Burton may never have enough mainstream support to win a majority of Oscar votes, but a big enough chunk of the Academy loves him that he has been able to capitalize when the mainstream vote has been split. In 2007, his Sweeney Todd snuck in between co-favorites Atonement and There Will Be Blood for Best Art Direction, and Alice in Wonderland pulled off the same trick, in the same category, in 2010 (victimizing Inception and The King's Speech). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the most recent beneficiary, snagging a Best Editing award last year despite 12-to-1 odds (!). As you may recall, that was one of the categories I analyzed in last year's piece, where I found it to be a two-way race between The Artist and Hugo.

Predicting the 84th Academy Awards

If you follow film pundits closely enough, it's actually quite easy to predict the Oscars. Rather than relying on past voting trends, complicated delegate math, or some other magic juice, the likely winners of this springtime election are identified through getting a proper sense for where the wind in Hollywood is blowing. This year, everyone is talking about The Artist, and consequently that's what will likely take home the gold in the Best Picture category on Sunday.

On the other hand, it's extremely hard to get a perfect score in your Oscar pool. While most categories feature consensus favorites, there are always a handful where there is a true horse race, and there the best you can do is guess—or, perhaps, apply a little magic juice.

According to the diverse and knowledgeable Gurus o' Gold, there are three categories this year that are truly tossups. (That leaves 21 that you can be relatively sure of for that Oscar pool.) Rather than just taking a random stab at them, though, let's try to see what clues Oscar history might hold as to the winners.

Best Editing
This is a two-horse race between this year's two most-nominated films: French silent flick The Artist and Martin Scorsese's Hugo. The Gurus currently tilt toward The Artist (eight votes to five, with one lone Moneyball dissenter), as do oddsmakers. It's something of a turnaround from a week ago, when Hugo was considered the slight favorite. What changed, and can we expect it to stay that way?

For answers, we need look no further than last weekend, when the American Cinema Editors snubbed Hugo in favor of The Descendants in their drama category yet stuck with The Artist for best editing in a musical or comedy. The winners of the ACE's "Eddies" (ha ha... get it?) have an uncanny knack for winning Best Editing from the Academy as well: 10 of the last 10 years, in fact, and 18 out of 20. True, the majority of those times, it was the Eddie winner for dramatic film that took Oscar gold. But with Kevin Tent's work on The Descendants probably too subtle to be noticed by rank-and-file Academy voters and currently not taken seriously as a contender, The Artist seems primed to join Chicago as a comedic winner of the category.

The Artist also seems to have an edge because of its heavy frontrunner status for Best Picture and Best Director, two categories that correlate closely with Best Editing. An analysis of the last 20 ceremonies reveals that the winner of Best Editing was 11 for 20 in the Best Picture field and also 11 for 20 in Best Director. Moreover, many of those nine that missed a Best Picture win (e.g., The Aviator, Traffic, Saving Private Ryan) are considered to have done so narrowly, so that statistic could be soft. Overall, 17 of the last 20 Editing winners were Best Picture nominees; coincidentally, 17 of 20 (but a different 17 of 20) were also Best Director nominees. The only exceptions come when the Academy is confronted by an action movie (such as The Bourne Ultimatum or The Matrix) that they absolutely adore (those two movies won every Oscar they were nominated for). But there is no such movie in the field this year, so count on Best Editing being one of the first dominos to fall if The Artist achieves even a mini-sweep on Sunday (the odds of which are very good).

For the record, the same historical analysis strangely showed that Best Editing also has an 11-for-20 matching-winner rate and a 17-for-20 matching-nominee rate with Best Sound Mixing (formerly Best Sound). This seems spurious to me, but it may be worth noting that The Artist, as a silent film, is not nominated in that category this year. Even juicier, Hugo is one of the frontrunners for Best Sound Mixing this year. However, as the connection between the two is not clear, I wouldn't put too much stock in this coincidence.

Could something other than The Artist or Hugo win this category? The Academy has occasionally opted for complex movies with many simultaneous storylines (which must be edited together, of course) such as The Social Network and Crash. On this slate of nominees, both Moneyball and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feature flashbacks of this ilk, but I simply don't think that's enough to overcome their lack of fit otherwise. Here's my guess for how the voting will break down:

1. The Artist
2. Hugo
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. Moneyball
5. The Descendants

Best Costume Design
This may be the most wide-open category, with four of the five nominees getting votes from the Gurus. Likewise, Las Vegas sees it as a race between Hugo and The Artist, with the former perhaps a very slight favorite, while Anonymous and Jane Eyre lurk in the background.

In the past, this category has rewarded almost nothing but period pieces. From 2006 through 2009 the winners were as follows: Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Duchess, and The Young Victoria. How's that for consistency? Unfortunately for us, though, neither Hugo nor The Artist is an historical drama about royalty; indeed, frustratingly, they are both more recent period pieces about the days of early cinema, both set within a year of 1930. However, the Gurus' dark horses, Anonymous and Jane Eyre, are set in Elizabethan and Victorian times, respectively; the queen herself is a character (along with several earls) in Anonymous.

Dovetailing nicely with its preference for period work, the Academy's philosophy for costume design has also historically been "more is more"—that is, the showiest work wins. This held true last year, when Alice in Wonderland won in a photo finish with The King's Speech; it was also evident in the wins for Memoirs of a Geisha and Moulin Rouge! Between Hugo and The Artist, this would seem to favor the Scorsese flick; The Artist's black and white mutes the costumes somewhat, whereas Hugo features some very whimsical getups when depicting some of the earliest fantasy films. Meanwhile, though, Anonymous and Jane Eyre sport the obvious frilliness that the Academy loves.

Clearly, then, the nominees divide into two camps: juggernaut and artsy. Based on the category's history, the artsy would seem to have the edge—but which one? A precursor award may again hold a clue. The Costume Design Guild has only a so-so record of choosing the same winners as the Academy (six of the last 13 Oscar winners also won one of the guild's three awards), but the CDG has at least nominated the eventual Oscar winner every year since 2001. This bodes poorly for Anonymous, which somehow missed the cut for the guild this year. Jane Eyre's odds with bookies are also significantly better, making it the favorite in my view.

Meanwhile, to break the tie between the juggernauts, let's look at other Oscar categories that are traditionally closely aligned with Best Costume Design. Only one category shared its winner with Best Costume Design more often than five times out of the past 20 (a poor 25% correlation): fellow eye-candy fodder Best Art Direction. Eleven of the past 20 winners in that category were also the best dressed. This year, the clear favorite for Best Art Direction is Hugo. Not only that, but the winner of Best Costume Design was at least nominated for Best Art Direction 17 times in the last 20 years (note to self: play the numbers 11, 17, and 20 at Powerball). Neither Jane Eyre nor Anonymous scored nods for their art directors this year, though. If history is to be trusted, Costume Design will ultimately fall to one of the juggernauts, and the more likely choice is Hugo.

However, I believe there is too much precedent standing in the way of a win for longtime Scorsese costume designer Sandy Powell. Begin with the fact that Best Costume Design is a notoriously Best Picture–unfriendly category: only five of the last 20 best films have won in Costume Design (yet another point against The Artist), and only eight Costume Design winners were even Best Picture nominees. Of course, I'm not saying that voters go out of their way to punish their favorite films here–just that they don't feel limited to them. In this category more than others, voters feel the freedom to go with otherwise unaccomplished movies whose costumes really stand out. Moreover, while it's rare for the award to go to a non-nominee in Art Direction, it's not unprecedented, especially in recent years. In fact, Marie Antoinette won in 2006 when Costume Design was its only nomination—a feat Anonymous and Jane Eyre look to duplicate this weekend. My final rankings for an extremely difficult category:

1. Jane Eyre
2. Anonymous (but at 33/1 odds, it might be worth putting $10 on!)
3. Hugo
4. The Artist
5. W.E.

Best Sound Editing
Sound is another place where the showiest—or, in this case, loudest—contender usually wins. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, blockbusters and other action fare do well in this category. This year, the field is led by our old friend Hugo (eight Guru votes and consistently the best odds), but Steven Spielberg's War Horse is a strong contender as well (five votes).

Immediately, it's clear that War Horse fits perfectly into the fraternity of past winners. Each of the past 14 winners has been either a modern war movie (The Hurt Locker, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, U-571, Saving Private Ryan), a historical/medieval war movie (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers), a disaster movie (King Kong, Titanic), or just the boring ol' action film with more hand-to-hand combat and gunfire (Inception, The Dark Knight, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Incredibles, The Matrix). In this sense, Hugo, without a single scene of violence, might actually be the least likely winner!

This has been borne out on the award circuit so far as well. While Hugo did score for its only nomination (Best Music in a Feature Film) at the Motion Picture Sound Editors' Golden Reel Awards, War Horse took home that organization's highest honor—also the one most closely associated with the Oscar. In sum, if we weren't looking at the odds or the pundits, it would appear that War Horse had a mortal lock on Best Sound Editing.

Another key kernel of wisdom for this category is that its winner often tracks with the winner of its twin award, Best Sound Mixing—but not as often as it has the reputation for. In 10 of the last 20 years (but four of the past six), the same film has taken home both trophies. (The record for Sound Mixing nominees in this category, which Hugo and War Horse both are, is again 17 for 20.) When the awards split, it is frequently because Sound Editing is more "niche" than Sound Mixing, which tends toward the mainstream (read: major Best Picture competitor). The Academy also consistently honors musicals with Best Sound Mixing for their skillful interweaving of normal audio with musical numbers.

If the pattern holds, Best Sound Editing will go to Hugo, the generally accepted favorite for Best Sound Mixing. But the pattern has a 50/50 chance of not holding, and the two categories could yet split. If this happens (as at least two Gurus are predicting), it would make sense that Best Sound Mixing would go to the popular Hugo and Best Sound Editing to the film that has been somewhat shunted to the side: War Horse. What's more, Hugo isn't even a sure thing in Best Sound Mixing, which has the same love for eardrum-splitting battles as Best Sound Editing does and could conceivably go to War Horse as well. In my opinion, it would be a mistake to base our Sound Editing prediction on a shaky assumption about Sound Mixing; in a more stable year, this datum might be more useful to us. If War Horse does win Best Sound Mixing, though, you can count on it taking Best Sound Editing, too.

In the bottom tier, Drive has the longest shot; the lack of nominations (this is its only one) for a film that probably deserved more tells you all you need to know about how much the Academy liked it. The two remaining nominees, Dragon Tattoo and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, both fit the action-film mold of the award. But Academy voters can be notorious snobs, voting only for films that don't stink (possibly out of a desire to keep "unworthy" films from being able to brag "Oscar winner!" on their Blu-ray boxes), so don't expect Transformers to be much of a factor. Dragon Tattoo did have some very impressive sound work, but it's simply not in the same league as the two frontrunners in this category. The final standings for Best Sound Editing:

1. War Horse
2. Hugo
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
5. Drive