Numlock Awards: How the Academy has changed, for good.

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.

We’ll have the final forecast out tomorrow! SAG made things interesting, as you can probably surmise. For now, I wanted to dive into the Academy real quick.

Note: This story contains a bunch of Datawrapper interactive charts and is probably best viewed online, not in your inbox.

This newsletter is, ostensibly, about predicting the Oscars. I know that’s what folks subscribe for, I know that’s been a driver of readership, it’s the meat and potatoes of the appeal. We’ve been pretty good at it for our run here, and I’m not going to deny that it’s the real fun of this venture.

That said, I’ve tried to distance us from the trap of the predicting-the-Oscars-with-math brand, and even back in the FiveThirtyEight days we were far more comfortable calling this a forecast and did not really see sufficient statistical justification for cranking out a percentage probability here, mostly because the organization that votes on the Oscars can’t actually be polled and the ways we try to project the state of the field are based off of sideways analyses of imperfect precursors.

That last bit is why I said that the ostensible point of this newsletter is to predict the Oscars, when if you ask me what gets me out of bed every January it’s actually the quest to figure out how the Academy has evolved, and how an incredibly important cultural institution changes, and then how that informs what gets to win an Oscar. That we can do with math.

Basically, to me the Academy is a puzzle that is constantly changing, and requires us to design a model where the weights constantly change as well to reflect that. So let’s look at what happened. The Academy had around 6,000 members at the beginning of this chart, and about 10,000 at the end of it.

It’s pretty cool to look at this next chart in light of my own run at this kind of stuff, if you’ll indulge me in a little nostalgia. I started doing the forecast when I was at FiveThirtyEight for the Oscars commemorating films released in 2013, in a barely-touched up version of Nate’s model he developed in, like, 2011ish if memory serves.

That worked fine, for the time, because the Academy wasn’t actually changing all that much, so even though the weighting of the precursors incorporated the prior 25 years of Oscars equally, we were still basically able to get away with it.

I left in 2018, which is when the evolution of AMPAS really kicked into gear. Starting this newsletter for that season was probably a good thing. I was pretty shocked at the ongoing rate of change, which was a key motivation for the fundamental shift in perspective I took when adapting that previous model into the one we currently run here. Namely, we look at the past 20 years, but most highly weighting recent performance (double weight for past ten years, treble weight for past five). That’s one reason that the model’s been able to keep pace with that enormous shift up top.

For the first few years of this Numlock Awards project, the question was when is the “New Academy” gonna surpass the old in votes, an event that happened in 2020, and was if anything affirmed and cemented with the Parasite win, the moment that an organization that was seeing a massive influx in international members for the first time honored a non-English language feature with Best Picture.

Now, it’s not even a question of where the influence lies: the people who joined in the past thirteen years have a 3-2 advantage. This breakdown remains an estimate, but it’s held up pretty well:

But I do want to point out, the growth hasn’t been equal.¹ Over the course of the past decade, the Actors, Sound, Producers and Writers have shed 10.5 percent of their vote share. Over the same period of time, the Documentary, Short Film, Feature Animation, Visual Effects, Artist Representatives and Production and Tech branches have seen their Academy vote share rise by 10 percent. The other branches have all stayed within a point of where they started:

There are some funny things about the Academy when you look at it. I think if you close your eyes and imagine an AMPAS voter, I see like an aged director wearing an ascot, or an actress who’s just jetting back from Cannes. This is a delightful fiction, and one maintained by where the camera points during the Academy Awards.

But did you know that there are more people in the Public Relations branch than there are in the Directors branch? That there are more Producers and Executives in the Academy than there are Actors? That there are more agents and “artists representatives” than there are costume designers? Feature Animation is the fourth-largest branch.

None of that’s a value judgment, one of the miraculous things about cinema is it requires vast and diverse capacities and talents in order to make a single work of art. I mostly bring it up because if there’s a misunderstanding about the Oscars, it’s that people think it represents the views of movie stars and Hollywood power players. It doesn’t. This is an industry award show that incidentally got pretty popular; it’s full of very normal people, lots of whom work pretty normal jobs, for pretty normal amounts of money, and whose views about movies probably generally resemble the views of anyone pretty plugged into the movie industry.

Now that we’ve had this shift, and this explosion of growth, and not inconsiderable realignment of the power bases within the Academy, we can come back to the part that brings many of you here — who’s gonna win? — and close with this chart.

For years, the Academy was stable, and many would argue stagnant, me among them. Then, we got to have an exciting decade where things got very, very chaotic at the Oscars. I think we’re coming out of that decade. In the past couple years, we’ve been getting a better handle on how they vote. In the years to come, we’re going to have a pretty reliable understanding of their views.

But the exciting thing is this: if things keep pace the way they are, the Academy will not be stagnant anymore. If things keep pace, the Academy will continue to have new blood, on the order of 2,000 new members every five years, which will replace the members who pass on or leave.

The Academy will not be stagnant, but it will be stable, but changing at a stable rate to ensure that it doesn’t grow so slowly that it risks irrelevance by only espousing the views of a generation that is no longer in power within the movie business, and doesn’t have to grow so quickly that the institution must undergo upheaval in order to remain relevant. That would be a welcome shift for an organization that has had to spend much of the past several decades in either a state of increasing stagnation or state of upheaval.

1. As always, shout out to Steve Pond at The Wrap for his dedication to covering the branch membership breakdown annually.