Numlock Awards: The final forecast for the 98th Academy Awards

It'll be a photo finish in most of the categories!

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. 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 and welcome to our final model forecast of the year! If you’ve been following all season long, nothing has really changed since our last updates (after BAFTA for Director and after SAG for everything else) except a few bits and bobs that don’t shift our forecast. Still, it’s just good form to get this all down on paper in one place.

There are a few more posts yet to come before the show, including Michael’s ballot, a pre-Oscars mailbag (comment below!) and perhaps another surprise. But for now, the forecast:

Best Picture

Our model’s saying One Battle After Another. The movie has won in lots of places, and won the most significant predictive awards on offer. We don’t have a case for anything else being the frontrunner. It’s not a lock, but it’s looking good.

If you’re one of the many fans of Sinners fan looking for hope, the best I got for you is that the path that the film would have to run would essentially be the Parasite math, where the movie that loses everywhere except SAG and the WGA (Original) pulls off the upset over the movie that won pretty much everywhere else. Generally, this race has some differences from that one based on updated weighting. While Sinners is a somewhat stronger contender than Parasite was, One Battle After Another is a much stronger frontrunner than 1917 was. How that comes out in the vote remains to be seen.

It’s certainly possible for our expectation to be subverted, given the effects of ranked-choice voting in Best Picture (which I covered in a post the Parasite year called Oscar Front-runners and ranked choice voting) and the now permanently-larger field (which I also covered in a post the Parasite year called Why Best Picture front-runners aren’t locks anymore).

Uncertainty is good! Makes the show fun. I like and stand by our forecast, but nothing set in stone here.

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another) has won all over the map, and we just don’t have much of a case for his rivals here. Huge upset if he loses, and probably one that precipitates something surprising in Best Picture as well.

Best Supporting Actress

The Supporting races are close this year but I feel pretty good about our frontrunners. Ultimately, Amy Madigan (Weapons)has run a solid race and no single rival has emerged. She’s great in the movie, the movie was well-liked, there are not a lot of other ways to honor the movie, and she won at the beginning of the race (getting people to see the performance) and nabbed the biggest win available right at the end of it (finishing strong). Not to mention, Madigan’s got a lot of good will.

Best Supporting Actor

Like I said, I feel alright about the supportings. If I miss on one of them, is what it is, but these races aren’t as close as they were a few weeks ago.

No offense to Elordi, but Stellan Skårsgard feels like the underdog with upset potential here, if only because the Academy is significantly more international than SAG, an American labor organization which didn’t nominate him or any other performance from an international contender.

That said, Penn’s a solid frontrunner who is absolutely peaking at the right time.

Best Actress

I confess I was kind of curious to see if The Bride! starring undisputed frontrunner Jessie Buckley (Hamnet) had any valence on the Oscar race; experienced onlookers know that, much like a no-hitter in baseball, you never mention a potential Norbit when it’s in progress. Alas, given that the general consensus appears to be “the movie’s the movie but Buckley’s characteristically great!” seems like this race is cruising to a clear finish.

Best Actor

It appears that the general narrative has caught up with us!

Just after SAG, we had Michael B. Jordan as a solid if surprising frontrunner with his last-minute win at the Actor Awards, as we argued peaking at just the right time. Then, of course, Timothée Chalamet made an observation about the societal disposition toward opera and ballet, and everyone saw as good an opportunity as any and bolted for the emergency exits of the ornithopter¹ and now Jordan’s a frontrunner seemingly everywhere.

If we get this one right, I will have to stew that the late gaffe also means the prediction markets win it with us.

Odds and ends:

• Our friend James England’s long-running project to size up the Oscar race through simulations based on a head-to-head matchup could use your input! I met James back in the FiveThirtyEight days and always check his model output heading into the night, it’s always interesting, he’s got a unique and clever approach.

• I was in LA last week for the Dorian Awards presented by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment critics! It’s a great group of winners, give them a look.

• Huge shout out to longtime reader Andrew Truong, who hosted a phenomenally impressive and superbly tasty ten course Oscar dinner this weekend. We had an amazing time, if you’re looking for inspiration for your own Oscars potluck, as far as I’m concerned he’s the guy to beat:

  

  What do you really think about this crop of contenders? Sound off in the comments below!

1. Was he wrong? Listen, I’m a big Lincoln Center guy, albeit more of an NYPhil fella than a Met Man, but he’s certainly got a point that the cultural hegemony of the institution is on the wane. Now, would I make this arguable point during the last days of Oscar voting? Where my constituency works in the arts? In a year where people are likely waiting until the last minute to vote because of new Academy procedures that ostensibly require one to watch every eligible film to vote in a category? Perhaps if he had attended a production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and glimpsed the dire ramifications of the hubris of Wotan, he would have known the answer to be “nah.”