Numlock Awards: The Final Forecast

Our prediction for the Academy Awards

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.

Now we have arrived at this, the final forecast. Things were looking a bit stale for a minute there, but then the SAG Awards and the BAFTAs went and made this thing interesting!

Just to recap, our Oscar forecast is and has always been completely open source, you can get the data for yourself if you so desire, all it does is it converts the historical predictive performance of a given precursor award into a score. It does this by first developing a weighted average of the past 20 years of accuracy,¹ it squares that decimal, doubles the square if it’s a guild award where there is overlap between those voters and Oscar voters, and then multiplies by 100 so it looks cute. That’s all you’re seeing here, a visualization of a weighted average, no black boxes and no pretend percentages.

Let’s start with the easy ones and get on with the good stuff. These charts are made in Datawrapper, if they get cut off for some reason just read this post in your browser.

Best Supporting Actor and Actress

These races are about as sealed up as possible. Kinda was wondering if there was going to be any movement, but it just seems like Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña are unstoppable at this point. This industry used to heap praise on ingenues, but being a well-liked and charismatic actor several decades into a productive and ambitious career who finally got a role that maximizes their specific talents remains a pretty surefire way to get some heat.

Best Actor

So Timothée Chalamet pulls off a win at SAG, and that’s certainly enough to raise questions about how stable Adrien Brody’s lead is.

Straightforwardly, I think this category is absolutely stacked, and all of these performances are really worthy. I did wonder if the Chalamentum was going to kick in, ever — Dune: Part Two kind of completely fell off the map for awards season, even though that movie was one of the best of last year, and I think A Complete Unknown coming in as a more elevated version of a boilerplate musical biopic surprised a bit, but clearly he’s got goodwill across the industry and the Academy does contain a lot of people from his generation. I still think Brody pulls it off, but I will definitely be on the edge of my seat during this award.

Best Director

A race! It’s DGA versus BAFTA and the Golden Globe. The model likes Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, which has performed well in lots of different places, over Sean Baker for Anora, which has performed well in just one. It’s a nailbiter.

Best Actress

Maybe the tightest race we’ve ever had?

The model distills local critics’ awards down to the five most predictive in each given race to serve as a representation of all the many local critics’ groups that serve as the Iowa Caucus of this election. To illustrate how close this is, if any of the four that backed Mikey Madison (Anora) flipped to Demi Moore (The Substance), the model would make a different call.

This is a very tight contest. I thought this post from Mark Harris was particularly insightful as to the state of the race, and I think it elaborates on why the Moore performance resonated among the SAG crowd.

This is like the fifth year in a row where BAFTA and SAG split, remarkably for awards that are so good at predicting this category. I kind of love that, it keeps it interesting.

Best Picture

Anora is still our pick. Frankly, the PGA and DGA are vastly better at predicting the winner than SAG and BAFTA. The track record is tough to dispute.

Like I mentioned a week ago, I think that Conclave is still very much in this and could absolutely win.

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

The volatile shifts in the Academy that prompted a decade of swift movement in the predictive power of the precursors is over, and their predictive power has leveled off in a stable position. While PGA and DGA are good — the best, even — we’d still expect them to get it wrong a little more than a third of the time. So I’m not counting Conclave out, but it sure seems like Anora’s year.

I would have loved to have the ACE awards to take place before the Oscars this year, but it’s entirely understandable why they delayed them. A win for Conclave there would have been the exact kind of below-the-line guild support I’d want to see to say that this late push is a credible challenge. Either way, it’ll be fun to see what goes down on Sunday!

Also, I will also plug as always the brilliant

James Ranks Everything

by our friend James England, he’s had some outstanding success in the Best Picture category and I always enjoy his analysis.

1. Weighting 20 years ago to 11 years ago 1x, 10 to 6 years ago 2x, and 5 to 1 years ago 3x