January 26th, 2025
The nominations are finally here, and I have reduced the list from 20 down to 10. There was one big surprise: I’m Still Here received a nomination for Best Picture. This was not on my list of 20 possible nominees—only one of the six sources I used to create the list of 20 possible contenders mentioned it back in late November. I added it and took out the other 11. In addition to this narrowing the field, the model also includes down-ballot nominations for the Academy Awards.
The picture we see is a three-film race: Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, and Anora. These are the only three movies with a forecasted chance of winning higher than 1%, and they’re all above 20% likely. However, we have no clear leader that passes the 50% likely threshold. The narratives are also starting to play out, as well: Emilia Pérez as the villain, The Brutalist using generative AI, and the underrated Sean Baker joining an exclusive club with four nominations in a single year. These movies all had similar nomination outcomes with the biggest Oscar categories, as all three have nominations for: Best Director, Best Leading Actress/actor, Best Supporting Actress/Actor, Best Adapted/Original Screenplay.
All three have also been nominated for the DGA award for directing. This award is, by far, the most predictive of a win (see the update below from January 12th). We can expect the film that wins this award (announced February 8th) to catapult into being the favorite.
January 19th, 2025
A big shuffle this week: Emilia Pérez passing by The Brutalist. If you look at the past week, nothing happened that was a huge slight to the latter in favor of the former. In fact, both movies tended to have the same outcome in the awards whose nominees were announced this week. So what’s going on?
It is due to the way variables depend on one another. For example, Washington beat Detroit last night in the NFL playoffs. If I were to ask you: Did that make fans happy or sad? Well, you’d have to say that it depends on who the fans were rooting for. If they were rooting for Washington, they’re happy! If they were rooting for Detroit, they’re sad. The same type of thing is going on here.
The Brutalist is the more “traditional” Oscar winner in its genre. Emilia Pérez is a film that was shown in contest at TIFF, is a musical and comedy, and won what could be seen as the lesser of the Golden Globe awards (musical/comedy instead of drama). What we’re seeing here is that nominations like those from BAFTA and PGA are validating Emilia Pérez as a true contender. Think of it this way: If you were to ask me if a musical or comedy is likely to win Best Picture, I would have to say that it depends on if the film has been getting love from other awards. The model is starting to see a pattern: Despite not being a serious Oscar-bait drama, enough of the other organizations are nominating and giving it awards that the model is saying it is time to take the musical/comedy seriously.
On the flip side, being nominated for a WGA award can actually hurt a film’s chances. But if you’re a drama movie, you’re expected to get a WGA nomination if you’re also gonna win Best Picture… which isn’t the case for comedies and musicals. So the fact that neither of them were nominated for the WGA means different things, because the effect of that award depends on other facets of the movie.
At any rate, we should get a clearer picture next week as the Oscar nominations are released. We’ll know the actual pool of nominees, but we’ll also know what other awards these films received that are important predictors of the main prize.
January 12th, 2025
The Directors Guild of America (DGA) award for Outstanding Directing - Feature Film is the most important predictor of who will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And it’s the most important by a lot. Really, this whole exercise I’m doing is about learning: How can I predict when the Academy and the DGA will disagree? The winner of the DGA’s top award has gone on to win Best Picture 75% (n = 57) times.
The DGA award wasn’t announced this past week… but the nominees were. An additional 21% (n = 16) of films nominated for DGA’s Outstanding Directing went on to win Best Picture.
That means there has only been three times a Best Picture winner was not nominated by the DGA, being Hamlet (1948), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and CODA (2021).
The point here is that, while we don’t know who won the DGA award, we know who did not win it. The nominees this year are for the directors of: A Complete Unknown, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, and The Brutalist. It’s very likely the winner at the Oscars will be among this bunch. What was touted as an open, unpredictable award season has begun to narrow: Only three of the twenty films I selected at the end of November as possible nominees have more than a 5% chance of winning: The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and Anora.
It looks like The Brutalist might be starting to run away with things. But that can all change when we learn the winners of these guild awards—especially the DGA.
By next Sunday night, we should have the Oscar nominees announced, and this list of twenty will get trimmed down.
January 5th, 2025
We are back from the holidays, and the Golden Globes tonight showed The Brutalist vaulting to a commanding lead. The film picked up the award for Best Motion Picture - Drama (as well as lead actor and director), This coming week will have many nominations, including the all-important Director’s Guild of America (DGA).
December 22nd, 2024
Not much action happened this week, aside from a few more critics’ groups announcing their nominees and/or winners. We see about the same picture as last week: The Brutalist leading, with Anora, Emilia Pérez, and Wicked rounding out the top four. Anora bumps up due to its win among the Dallas-Fort Worth Critics Association. However, this award is not a major indicator in the model by the end of the season: It could indicate how things might go in the future, but if major awards start to disagree, we’ll see Anora’s chances dip.
This is the last update for 2024, as the holidays grab everyone’s attention and nothing much happens. I’ll be back, however, on January 5th to post an update after the Golden Globes.
December 15th, 2024
In addition to the Golden Globe nominations, we also saw a slew of critics’ associations from various metropolitan areas announced their awards this week. The first of the professional guilds also announced their nominations this week, in the American Cinema Editors (ACE) and Costume Designers Guild (CDG).
The most notable change is that of Emilia Pérez leaping into second place. It led the Golden Globe nominations at ten (although this is helped out by it being a musical and thus the score and two songs were nominated). Importantly, the model looks at characteristics in tandem with one another. Being in contention at TIFF was not enough on its own to help Emilia Pérez out on its own; although it has developed a reputation for showing Oscar-winning films, many in contention are not. However, pair this with various other nominations for best-of-the-year it received this week, and the model now realizes it is a true Oscar contender that was also shown at TIFF.
I still agree with the trade publications arguing this season is “unpredictable,” but we’ll continue to have a better idea as the season progresses.
December 8th, 2024
In the last week, we saw a number of critics’ organizations start to release their best-of-the-year lists and awards. The most predictive of Best Picture is winning Best Film from the New York Film Critics Circle—and this is precisely why The Brutalist is now the frontrunner. Although some other films—like Anora—had some success with winning some of these organizations’ awards, winning can actually be a negative indicator of Best Picture success. The model learns from previous patterns, and previous patters show that winning the top honor from certain critics’ groups (such as Boston, Los Angeles, or Seattle) tend to show what well-esteemed films the Academy will not reward.
It is still a pretty uncertain race, with Vanity Fair recapping this week by calling the season “gloriously messy”, but the one award that mattered the most by far this week was NYFCC, leading to more confidence in The Brutalist. We will see if others agree, especially as we go beyond critics and start seeing what professional guilds—many of whom may also vote for the Oscars themselves—say in the coming weeks.
December 1st, 2024
With polling the election in my rearview, I am pivoting to: awards season! I am running back my Best Picture model that I began working on last year. I will update this page with a new entry every Sunday through the morning of the Oscars to display and discuss how the race has developed.
Although I added a few more variables, the details of the model are more or less the same (see the original post for details). The only additional technical details to note this year are:
When I discuss if an aspect of the movie is helping or hurting its chances, I am relying on SHAP values.
The model is only trained on Best Picture nominees, which we do not know yet. To start the model, I examined six reputable publications to get a pool of 20 potential nominees. Until the nominations are announced on January 17th, the model is assuming all 20 have been nominated. That means we’ll see some big changes in the model after that given a smaller field.
The only award information we have currently are the Gotham Awards nominees, which are for independent films only. The rest of the information we could call, in political terms, a “fundamentals-only” model. The predictions right now are based on festivals, aggregated review scores, runtime, genre, studio, MPAA rating, information about the director, etc.
Why is Wicked in the lead right now? It fits a few characteristics that help a film:
It falls in the sweet spot of runtime at 160 minutes. Broadly speaking: a runtime of under 100 minutes hurts a film’s chances; between 100 and 150 minutes doesn’t impact the chances much; and a runtime of 150 minutes or longer helps a film.
The director has never directed any movies that have been nominated for Best Picture before.
It has the genres of musical and romance.
It’s distributed by a major studio.
The Brutalist has many of the same things going for it, except it is hurt by not being listed under the genre of romance. It benefits from a major studio distributing it with a wide release after the New Year—Oscar bait time.
My personal favorite, Anora, is unique in these top three because it was in competition at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which helps the film. Notably, winning at Cannes does not help it at all, which makes sense: Only The Lost Weekend (1945), Marty (1955), and Parasite (2019) have won the top prizes at both Cannes and the Academy Awards.
Funnily enough, a Metacritic score of 91 for Anora hurts its chances of winning. Why? The aforementioned SHAP values show that a score from about 60-73 helps a movie a little bit. In the 74-92 range, it actually hurts the film’s chances slightly. As it approaches 100, however, its chances of winning are boosted. This would appear to give movie snobs the ammunition to say that the Academy usually makes the wrong choice—unless a film is receiving all-time good reviews (e.g., Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave, Parasite, The Hurt Locker).
One last film to mention, second-to-last, is September 5. As of the November 14 update of The Hollywood Reporter’s Feinberg Forecast, he believes it is the favorite. Why the massive difference between my model and his forecast (which is based on “screening films, consulting with voters, analyzing campaigns and studying the results of past seasons”)? Runtime. The database I’m getting runtimes from says it is only 91 minutes. The shortest film to have won the Best Picture is Marty (1955) at 90 minutes. Rounding out movies less than 100 minutes are Annie Hall (1977, 93 minutes) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989, 99 minutes). Two of these are romance, which September 5 is not and which hurts its chances. September 5 is categorized under history, which coupled with the short runtime also hurts its chances. I haven’t seen it (I am just a data scientist in the Midwest, I haven’t been able to), but it would appear to be a longshot, despite Feinberg’s rating. Nonetheless, it looks good (Past Lives and First Cow have made me a John Magaro fan, who is second-billed in the film).
In the next few weeks, we’ll have critics associations releasing their awards, some important nominations, and more information about A Complete Unknown when its review embargo lifts. I’ll see you back here next week for an update to the race.