There's not a frontrunner and it's dumb we're pretending there was

The shock-and-awe awards playbook isn't working.

Last week the Oscar race got some incredibly shocking news. Here’s a bit of a recap:

In the AP:

Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” is an Oscar contender unlike any other. […] And just as singularly, it’s a best picture front-runner that, it sometimes seems, no one likes.

At Vulture¹:

It Looks Like Emilia Pérez Is the Best Picture Front-runner Right Now

In Time:

How Emilia Pérez Became a Divisive Oscar Frontrunner

In Business Insider:

"Emilia Pérez" is a frontrunner for the 2025 Oscars after bagging 13 nominations, but a growing number of fans and critics are turning against it.

Anyway, the news is, wait, we had a frontrunner? And it was Emilia Perez?

News to me!

I think there’s a couple things going on here, and all of them are worth pulling apart. Let’s dive in.

Movies that get nominated for a lot of stuff aren’t frontrunners, dammit.

We here at the Numlock Awards newsletter determine our assessment of the race by rating each precursor award by its historical accuracy and then using that record to suss out the state of an Oscar race. Currently, we think things look like this, because everything got delayed in this Oscar season for some pretty understandable reasons:

Now, other people are welcome to have alternative ways to inform their opinion about the race — that’s what makes stuff fun! — but I’d caution against putting too much stock if any in the number of nominations a movie racks up as anything especially informative about its relative position in the race.

First off, no, there is no indication whatsoever that Emilia Pérez is a frontrunner based on precursors. It won a Golden Globe for Comedy, which has a predictive power somewhere between A Hill Of Beans and Guy Who Says They’re One Of Fourteen Keys To Win The Oscar.

Second, there’s no hidden momentum here; I track just under 30 local critics’ group prizes to fuel the model, and 21 have awarded a Best Picture this season, and none of them were Emilia Pérez.

Mostly, though, getting the most nominations doesn’t tell us jack about Oscar winners. Let’s inspect the record.

This is pretty grim! Obviously ties make this annoying, but there have been 25 movies that won or tied for the most nominations over the past 20 years. Only 7 of those 25 movies have won Best Picture.

Hey, let’s have some fun here. Let’s pretend there is a precursor that always gave a win to the most-nominated movies. Let’s run the numbers; Over the past 20 years, assigning ties 0.5 wins, we’d have an award show with a 30 percent prediction rate, and in our what-have-you-done-for-me-lately weighted average just a 33 percent prediction rate. That’s about as predictive as the WGA award for Best Original Screenplay.

Would you, knee jerk, crown the winner of the WGA award for Best Original Screenplay as the instant Best Picture frontrunner? I thought not!

So, that’s the basic number, but if you don’t feel like math can win you over on this one, enough about allow me to talk about what actually convinced me that what gets nominated ought to have zero impact on your assessment of the strength of a campaign.

The Warren Paradox

I came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons, but if there was a Road to Damascus moment it’s when I started following Steve Pond’s annual assessment of how many votes it takes to get an Oscar nomination in given categories. A highly-motivated group of a couple dozen people could nominate a ham sandwich, depending on the category.²

For instance, based on Pond’s 2025 calculations, you need:

• 88 votes to get a writing nomination

• 71 votes to get a production design nomination

• 67 votes to get a song or score nomination

• 40 votes to get a makeup and hairstyling nomination.

• 31 votes to get a costume design nomination

Essentially, I like to use decisions made by large, insightful groups of people who have tastes that resemble the overall Academy as a whole when I am assessing the state of an Oscar race. Historically, you do not find this quality in the branches.

For a stark example, take Diane Warren, who is yet again nominated for some phoned-in doggerel for a movie that doesn’t exist. She has been nominated to no avail 16 times, as forceful and iconic early work gave way to late-career bait. Clearly what is happening is there is a constituency of at least 67 voters within the music branch who believe that she ought to have a competitive Oscar — honorary award be damned — but come voting time, there is simply not a plurality of 9,907 voters who agree with that niche sentiment.

This is incidentally why we don’t really try too hard to predict nominations; realistically, anything’s possible. Either way, it’s certainly why I don’t put a lot of value in one single nomination. We just don’t know what the votes looked like, even if we can draw a few conclusions about what was done to win them.

The shock-and-awe awards playbook

There is something potentially interesting about that list of most-nominated movies. Shall we take a look at who made them?

Well, for starters

• Since 2019, Netflix was responsible for 4, or half of them

• Of that group of 5 most-nominated movies since 2019 that did not win, Netflix was responsible for 3 of them.

Let’s say you’re a hypothetical company called Qwikster and you’re new on the scene and you want to make a big splash. You have a very considerable awards budget, but you also (as a result of your business model) have an incredibly cutthroat and probably accurate understanding of your typical slob’s attention span. As a result, you really want to run one and only one movie as the flagship of your Oscar campaign, but you want to make it impossible to avoid, and compete in every category.

You’d probably want a visually splashy flick (to get you those below-the-lines), lots of worthy stars (there are four acting categories! Four!), with distinctive music in it (the music branch is capable of nominating songs that couldn’t even get optioned for elevators) and hell, if you can also run it for Best International that’s a freebie. Run up the scoreboard, a bit; after all, you have friends in lots of branches, you can get the noms.

But once all 10,000 vote? Hey, maybe you don’t have two thousand people who want to give that an Oscar. It happens! It specifically happens to Mank, Roma, The Power of the Dog, not to mention other second-place most-nomination getters like The Trial of the Chicago Seven, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Irishman …

We used to talk about “Oscar bait” as treacly weepies, movies about gigantic bummers that stirred the heart and numbed the brain, a meta that was successful enough to keep the lights on, at least in the Miramax logo. Now, I contend, Oscar bait is different, it’s not a knife in your heart, it’s a shotgun to your ballot, stuff that has been optimized to compete in every category even if it’s not actually good enough to win in them.

And, just like with earlier versions of Oscar bait, seems like people might be getting a little tired of em.

1. Listen I think Vulture’s cool here, the most striking word in the headline doesn’t show up in the piece which to my eye usually means an editor wrote it and I’ll give the very talented Nate Jones a pass here, but a headline’s a headline so I’m pointing it out.

2. And obviously the eligibility rules; for instance, technically, you’d have to nominate the country of origin of the ham sandwich for Best International Feature, and you’ve have to make sure not a single ingredient ever appeared in another film to get it up for Best Original Score.