Could Farsite Forecast be to the Oscars what FiveThirtyEight was to politics?

At the Golden Globes on Sunday, nearly every movie was a winner, throwing many predictions for the Oscars askew. This year is tough for prognosticators, but one group, FarsiteForecast.com, claims its statistical model has an edge in predicting who will win the Academy Awards. In the vein of FiveThirtyEight, the blog run by Nate Silver that has proven to incredibly accurate in its predictions about political elections, Farsite applies predective modeling, or data science, to the Oscar race.

While Lincoln has been picked by many bloggers as most likely to win Best Picture at the Oscars, for example, it didn't win either of the Golden Globes' top honors, which went to Argo and Les
Miserables. Shouldn't that great showing raise the odds that one of these films
will win? According to FarsiteForecast.com, which is using data science
to track the Oscar race, the answer is no. The site is currently giving Argo just a 2.3% change of winning and Les Miserables a 1.6% chance of winning. Farsite predicts the race is between Lincoln (38.4% chance of winning) and Silver Linings Playbook (30.8% chance of winning).Since 1989's Driving Miss Daisy, no movie has won the Oscar for Best Film without also being nominated for Best Director. Since neither Argo or Les Miserables received that nomination, the odds are against them.

Other areas where Farsite Forecast predicts a toss-up, I see a clear winner. For Best Actor, they're giving Bradley Cooper and Daniel Day-Lewis nearly equal odds of winning. Personally, I think Day-Lewis underwent a more impressive transformation, but I also think Oscar voters wil want to
reward a "serious" actor of his stature in a film that was most commended for its acting. Cooper is fresh off his roles in The Hangover series.

Cooper is fresh off
his roles in The Hangover series. In his most
critically-acclaimed role yet, could he be the latest Hollywood star to make the
often transition from action and comedy star to Oscar winner? Right now,
he's 7% less likely to win than Day-Lewis, and I think that gap will
widen.

 

When it comes to the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, Farsite Forecast has one race in a lock already. Anne Hathaway has an 84.4% chance of winning the Oscar. For Hathaway, it's time to start creating space on the mantle for her statuette. During the Globes, Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain both won Best Actress, in their respective comedy/drama categories. Lawrence has the edge in the Oscar race, with a 53.3% probability compared to Chastain's 34.6%.

Farsite Forecast's predictions currently match closely with bloggers' top contenders in each race. The model will continue to evolve as we get closer to the race and important guild awards are doled out. Will Farsite Forecast live up to the accuracy of similar models, like FiveThirtyEight's incredible track record at predicting political wins?

Breaking down the Producers Guild nominees

By Sarah Sluis

Last year, the Producers Guild of America crowned The Hurt Locker as the top film of 2009. The PGA has correctly predicted the majority of Oscar Best Picture winners, making its nominee list a much-regarded crystal ball for the eventual Academy nominees and winners. The PGA nominates ten films, just like the Oscars, but at least a couple of movies seem unlikely to receive nods from both the PGA and the Academy.

The best film nominees:
127 Hours
Black Swan
Inception
The Fighter
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit

Possible Omission #1: The Town. For me, this movie wasn't anything special. Spike Lee's 2006 movie Inside Man was a much more surprising, fun bank robbery movie, and it didn't get any love in awards season. The Town had some thrilling bank robbery scenes, but its Boston atmosphere didn't totally draw me and the romance felt like star-director Ben Affleck grabbing at air.

Possible Omission #2: Toy Story 3. Though this film has showed up on one top ten list after another, it's most likely that the movie will end up with a nomination in the animated category, where I hope it has tough competition from the DreamWorks Animation stunner How to Train Your Dragon.

Possible Omission #3: 127 Hours. Within the blogosphere, this movie's been taking the biggest beating, with many ruling it out because it failed to catch fire at the box office. Also, some Academy viewers were reportedly "afraid" to see the amputation scene, leading James Franco to film a video with his grandma, who wore a sweatshirt reading "I Kept My Eyes Open for 127 Hours."

What films could fill possibly end up in the Academy top ten? My votes are going to Winter's Bone and Blue Valentine. Winter's Bone is more likely to receive an acting nomination than a Best Picture one, but the movie is so affecting, I can't imagine Oscar voters not responding. Blue Valentine is much tougher to watch (and that's taking Winter's Bone's gory closing scene into account), and features a much younger, blue-collar couple--the opposite of a typical Academy voter. The seven remaining films seem highly probable nominees to me: Inception's the blockbuster everyone can get behind, The Kids Are All Right is the small indie that could, and most of the other specialty film nominees have risen into the top ten: True Grit, Black Swan, The King's Speech, and The Fighter are all earning millions of dollars a week, a pretty big change from last year, when only Up in the Air was achieving that mixture of critical and commercial success at the end-of-the-year box office. The Academy Award nominations are only three weeks away, on Jan. 25, and these nominations from the PGA have solidified the majors. Now it's up to the Academy to make some last minute substitutions in the game.

Oscars dangle promise: 'truly different' ceremony

By Sarah Sluis

During yesterday's Oscar lunch, while nominees were presented with commemorative sweatshirts

(what?), the chief of the Academy promised something "truly different." The non-statement, for some reason, reminded me of a scene in The Bad and the Beautiful. Faced with a decidedly un-scary cat man costume, the filmmakers hide it with a bit of shadowy lighting, and voila, instant horror hit. The ambiguous statement will have bloggers abuzz with all the ways the Academy could improve the ceremony, much more than an announcement about "awesome career montages," "musical guests!" and "awkward in-aisle acceptance speeches" could rile up potential viewers. At least on a PR front, the Academy's generating excitement.

My guess is that the Academy will go for more interaction between the audience and those on-stage. Movie fans, myself included, love that "backstage" element and looking at what goes into making a show. I caught part of the Miss America pageant a couple weekends ago, which has tried to revive its ratings by incorporating an announcer backstage (as well as a mini-reality series weeks beforehand). Viewers were treated to the entertaining sight of coiffed contestants high-tailing it to their dressing rooms like their life depended on it--they looked like Runaway Bride. Much of the fun of the Oscars, in my experience anyway, is the red carpet and interviews, the bizarre jokes and corny segments that make you turn to the person sitting on the couch next to you and mouth 'What?,' and the non sequiturs, trips, and tearfully garbled speeches that make the show more real. A smoothly running show just doesn't entertain. These days, if people want banal, they'll watch a TMZ clip of a celebrity getting out of a car, not an artfully delivered, rehearsed acceptance speech. Will the Academy be able to rise to its promise, and deliver a "truly different" ceremony?