Numlock Awards: The field narrowed, but these contenders can still seize the moment

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter

Hello from London, where I’m doing vast amounts of on-the-ground reporting into the BAFTA Awards¹ after a great time in Berlin for the Berlinale where I was scouting for next year’s big contenders.²

We’ve seen the PGA awards, the DGA awards, and the BAFTAs. Right now we’ve got a few pretty damned interesting races, and — more importantly — a few boring races that at least have the decency to be boring for interesting reasons.

Best Supportings

I will said, straightforwardly: I think big picture there’s a problem in Best Supporting.

Right now, you’ve seen sweeps from Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin. This follows total precursor sweeps from Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr. in 2024, Ariana DeBose in 2022, Daniel Kaluuya in 2021, Laura Dern and Brad Pitt in 2020, and Mahershala Ali in 2019.

We’ve had, two, at best, truly competitive supporting categories in the six cycles I’ve been doing this newsletter (supporting Actress in 2019 and 2023) and if Saldaña and Culkin win at SAG, that will make it seven years.

These categories are feeling a bit stale; I can’t help but wonder if it’s because they have essentially mutated into Best Leading Actor Who Is Running In A Slightly Easier Category So They’re Not Competing Against A Co-Star. Can this be fixed? I don’t know. Maybe rival campaigns should get a little feistier about category fraud, but of all the optimizations made by the consultants to award season this one annoys me the most.

That, or I just don’t think that voters take these categories seriously, and I think it’s kind of nuts that these appear to be functionally decided by the voters of the Golden Globes.

Best Actor

Really looks like it’s Brody’s to lose.

I was talking to a friend a week ago who loved The Brutalist and was disappointed in how it was performing. I told him that, if the year goes how it certainly looks like it’s going, The Brutalist will have a similar run as The Aviator as an ambitious film that delivers a worthy performance a win but kind of underperforms given how stacked the cast is and how good the movie is. In ten years it will air on AMC a lot. That’s all I got on this.

Best Actress

We have a race!!

I’ll have more to say about this after SAG but if there’s one thing the BAFTAs are still damn good at it’s the acting races. This was a huge win for Mikey Madison, and means that we’ve got a real race in this category.

Best Director

Finally, some good f***ing food.

This race is closed, and it’s going to be a tight one. DGA breaks one way, all the other precursors break the other way? A recipe for a damn good finish, this one is going to keep us on the edge of our seat all Oscar night. The model gives Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) the edge, over Sean Baker (Anora).

Best Picture

First things first, Anora will be entering into Oscar night as this model’s frontrunner. There are simply not enough points on the board for another film to supplant it.

Second, we can feel pretty good about that frontrunner status. The PGA has been good at picking winners, in no small part because they pick their winner using ranked-choice voting, the same way the Academy does, while groups like the DGA, SAG and BAFTA just give it to whoever wins that first plurality. I’m pretty confident if they switched to ranked choice voting, they’d more often than not sync up with the Academy; I’m glad they don’t because boring awards seasons will kill awards season.

Third, I think if anything the losses at PGA and DGA should be the last dagger in the heart of the idea that Emilia Pérez was ever the frontrunner. I was very skeptical of that claim, as I wrote two weeks ago, because the only argument that it was a front-runner was that it got a lot of nominations, which historically means, and forgive me if I lapse into statistical jargon here, jack shit. The PGA finished voting the very day before the scandal about its star’s tweets broke, meaning to me that there wasn’t actually that much momentum left to be killed by the news.

Lastly, and most importantly: it ain’t over.

Conclave won at BAFTA and could very well perform well at SAG. It will not be enough to overcome Anora’s lead, but it could get close, here. One reason I’m curious to see how things go this year is that we have seen the overall success rates of the precursor predictions stabilize after several years of dynamic change, and one part of them stabilizing is that we’re probably going to see a general reversion towards the mean. Allow me to dive in a bit here.

What I mean by that is that we’ve seen lots and lots of movement over the past several years, as the Academy has grown and changed and even some of the voting bodies of the precursors have changed, some in different ways than the Academy.

That’s meant that lots of the stability in precursor prizes ended, and we saw some major shifts, the key one being that the BAFTAs went from great at predicting best picture to bad at it.

If you look at this chart, you will observe that 2010 to 2020 was a tumltuous decade for precursor performance, and that 2021-24 has generally seen those stats stabilize, give or take. I think that generally, now that the model has caught up with the Academy, we can expect to see some reversion to the mean over the next few years, which invariably will mean that sometimes awards that tend to get it right must by necessity occasionally get it wrong.

Basically, I think that generally speaking the PGA is gonna get it right like 65% of the time, the DGA is gonna get it right about 55% of the time, Critics’ Choice and SAG is probably gonna level out at around 50/50 success rate, and BAFTA should come in around ~40%.

Those leveling off around those steady states is important, at least for our purposes. If you asked me 10 years ago to estimate how much Best Picture preference overlap the BAFTAs had with AMPAS, I could have said probably around 60 percent. If you asked me in 2015 what it would be in 2025, I could not honestly tell you, because they were at the time two black boxes moving in unknown directions as they relate to one another. Now, though, I can tell you: whatever changes to the voters of the British Academy and whatever changes to the voters of The Academy have essentially boiled down to a Best Picture preference overlap of about 40 percent, meaning its shed about a third of its predictive power. Since both institutions have slowed the rate of their once-rapid growth, we’d expect the overlap to remain in the ballpark of 40 percent pretty much indefinitely, evolving gradually if at all.

Essentially, the precursors we follow, they’re all going to be wrong plenty of times now. Like, 65 percent and 40 percent are meaningfully different for forecasting inputs, but they do individually definitely mean “it’s gonna break the other way often enough to surprise us.” Hopefully, in the aggregate, we get enough unified guidance that we usually can make an informed calculation of what the top one or two contenders is. But reality is, one year we’re gonna find that PGA was wrong and BAFTA was right, and it could very well be this year.

SAG’s gonna be great.

1. jk jk, I’m here for a work thing.

2. also just kidding, but I did give a really fun keynote to the CinemaVision 2030 event and became a founding member of Fiona Shaw Best Supporting Actress 2026 Bandwagon after catching a screening of Hot Milk.