I’m ecstatic! 17 out of 23 categories for the 2024 Oscars were predicted perfectly for a 73% success rate! And that raises my 7-year average to 56%, which isn’t as great as I like it, but is good enough. If I can keep performing with these kinds of numbers it should keep going up. (Not that it counts in the official stats, but I got four more correct predictions if you count my backup choices! Meaning that I only really blew two categories. More on all that below). Here is a link to my prediction essay.
Needless to say I got Best Picture right (Oppenheimer) but I suspect that just about everyone did so that doesn’t count a whole lot. Of the other seven major categories – directing, writing, and acting – I predicted the directing and three of the acting categories correctly. For supporting actress I had predicted Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), but Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) won it – I had her as my backup choice. The writing categories seem to always give me trouble and I’m not quite sure why. Although I thought Barbie would get the Adapted Screenplay Oscar, it actually went to American Fiction which suggests that might be a very good movie. (Oppenheimer was my backup and it didn’t get it either). The really challenging category was Original Screenplay and my first choice, Past Lives, didn’t win, but my second choice did, Anatomy of a Fall. I am looking forward to both of those films very much.
So in the major categories, I only got five out of eight with two more as second choices. I did a little better in the minor categories, with six out of nine correct predictions. My second choice won in two of the other three, where The Zone of Interest beat Oppenheimer in Sound and Poor Things beat Barbie in Costumes. And I completely blew Production Design where I predicted Oppenheimer with Barbie as my second, but Poor Things won.
My predictions in the Special Interest categories were all correct – 20 Days in Mariupol (Documentary), The Zone of Interest (International), and The Boy and the Heron (Animated) – but I’m guessing lots of people got those three correct. And in what is really, for me, a guessing game, I managed to get all three of the Short categories correct. Although I’d rather not admit it, I don’t think my process gets much credit for those three, I just got a little lucky this time.
So what do the results say about the prediction process? Well, for one thing, I think I did better this year than last because last year I watched The Banshees of Inisherin and liked it so much that I ended up picking it for a lot of things that it did not win. So one change, forced more on me by circumstance than design, is that I didn’t watch any of these films before making my predictions – in fact, I still haven’t (first film in the queue is up this Sunday!). Not being aware of any of the films personally means I was only able to use what data is available – Oscar nomination patterns, Oscar buzz, ratings of the films by both audiences and critics from two different sources, and general news about the films from, primarily, the New York Times. Quite possibly, this range of data and opinions gives me a somewhat objective look into the movies. In the future I will refrain from watching any of the nominated movies until after the Oscar ceremony.
There are some general patterns I look for to use in my predictions, but I kind of think that if I give out too much, it sort of reduces the value of my predictions. If everyone can reproduce them, then why would you read my prediction column? But here’s one factoid that might help people understand what happens at the Oscars: out of 38 nominated feature films, only ten of them won any Oscar at all. And of those only three of them won more than one Oscar and only two won more than two. Are some movies really that much better than others, or are there non-qualitative factors that go into the Oscar wins?
Anyway, that wraps up the 2024 Oscar season. Now on to watching and reviewing all 38 movies. Happy movie watching!
