Numlock Awards: The Pre-Nominations State of Play

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter, and it’s back! 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’ve got model data!

Just to recap, here’s what we do here. We know that precursor prizes can often give us insight into the eventual winners. We know that not all precursor prizes are equally good at this, and some are great and some are merely fine. We know that the Academy is changing, and the precursor prize voters are also changing, so we need to favor recent performance over long-term results. We know that some prizes don’t feature future Oscar voters, like critics’ awards, and we know some do, like guilds. With these assumptions in mind, here’s how we build the model.

• Each precursor prize gets a score based on how good they are at predicting the eventual winner of the Oscar.

• The score is built from a weighted average of the last 20 years of data. More recent data is weighted higher: the results of 6 to 10 years ago is double weight, and the results of 1 to 5 years ago is tripled. This is how we value that recent insight.

• That weighted average is squared, and then doubled if it’s a guild award. It’s multiplied by 100 because it’s easier to deal with. That means that a critic award with an 80 percent success rate has a score of 64 points, because 0.8 squared is 0.64, which times a hundred is 64. A guild award with a 40% success rate has a score of 32 points, because 0.4 squared is 0.16, which times a hundred and doubled is 32. This has the effect of really rewarding successful predictors.

• You get a fifth of those points when you’re nominated for the award, and all of them if you win it.

• I also factor in the five most-predictive local critics’ prizes for a given category. The combined weight of all five of those is set to be equal to the average of the weights of the Critics’ Choice and the Golden Globes in that category. This rarely has any significant impact on the endgame of the model, but is pretty useful for sampling the water early if there’s serious critical consensus developing.

Let’s jump in! There will be five nominees in each category, except Best Picture, where there will be ten.

Best Picture

Pretty wide field, honestly. I’d expect the unexpected in this one, the ten fixed nominees and the way the Oscars tabulate nomination votes means that anything is really possible here for a niche film to get a nomination with a sufficiently dedicated fanbase.

Though the edge cases look like they fall off a cliff here, I wouldn’t count anyone out because they dropped the minimum vote threshold for nomination.

Best Director

Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) has been doing very well with wins at three of the five most-predictive critics’ prizes and at the Golden Globes. As ever, the DGA really is the main award that matters, though, so we’ll have to wait until they meet to start throwing around words like “frontrunner.”

If you notice the BAFTAs behaving a little erratically compared to some of the other precursor prizes, Scott Feinberg at The Hollywood Reporter had a really excellent exploration of how some procedural changes are making the nominations for that award a bit unique. BAFTA has been really stellar with the downballot winners over the past few years, so I’m really interested if the nominations adjustments impact the ability of the winners to telegraph the Academy view.

Best Actor

Fascinating little category, we’ve got two men who appear to be slam dunks for nominations and then a pretty decent field. I’ll be interested to see which holds up, BAFTA or SAG, especially in light of those British procedural changes. Nic Cage being on this chart brings me a great deal of joy on a personal level.

Best Actress

BAFTA has historically been incredible in this category. This year, they made a lot of unconventional nomination choices, so we’ll see if they remain incredible. This one already looks like a ballot-breaker, I’m psyched let’s do this.

Best Supporting Actor

Kodi Smit-McPhee has been on a tear. The Golden Globe is historically excellent at predicting Best Supporting Actor. I shouted this category out in my post about the Golden Globes a few weeks ago, because I’m seriously interested in how the Globes register this awards season. Like I mentioned there, my personal theory has long been “nobody actually looks to them for guidance, but they are a very good focus group,” and we’ll see if that pans out.

Best Supporting Actress

Would you look at how small this field is? The local critics offer us nothing in the way of insight. The Critics’ Choice, SAG, and BAFTA have spread the love around. Really anyone is a contender in this one.