Where our 2024 Oscar model stands before the Nominations!

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.

Hello!

Welcome back to the Numlock Awards newsletter! For the past six years, we’ve continued the work I was doing at FiveThirtyEight to try to understand the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, model their membership, and use precursor prizes to forecast the state of the Oscar race. We’re coming off a pretty good six-for-six year on that front, and after more than a decade of changes to the Academy we appear to have an increasingly stable model of how the precursor award voters tend to reflect — and not reflect — the secretive body that votes for the Academy Awards.

This year, we’ll have an update on the organization’s evolution in membership, we’ll take another dive into their finances, we’ll chase down a few fun stories about some of the precursor bodies like BAFTA and SAG, and at the end of it all we’ll try to get a handle on who’s going to win.

This season has been somewhat delayed — I’m reluctant to put out too much of a forecast before we get good data (e.g., not the Golden Globes) and before voting actually happens (no need to get ahead of ourselves) — and obviously our hearts go out to the folks in Los Angeles.

The model

We’ve explained it in more detail in previous years and we’ll explain it in more detail once the nominations actually come together, but essentially this works by figuring out how reliably a given precursor award has predicted the eventual Oscar winner for a given category, with an emphasis on recent performance over historical performance, and a boost to insider guild and professional organization awards over outsider critic awards.

Ahead of nominations tomorrow, here’s who’s got the energy heading into this season, with new spiffy Datawrapper charts. Just a heads up, we don’t predict Oscar nominees; we probably could, but we don’t, so this is mostly just fodder for “snubs and surprises” tomorrow!

As a reminder, this is the most crowded these charts are gonna look.

Here’s where we’re at when it comes to Best Supporting Actress, it’s actually one of our choppiest fields, it’s pretty clear who the top two most likely nominees are but really anything below that is going to be a bit of a jump ball:

The Best Supporting Actor category is similar, though if it ends up being “the four SAG nominees that have contended elsewhere, and someone else” then I wouldn’t be too shocked.

Historically, the DGA nominees tend to be the Oscar nominees, but hey, people seem to like Dune. We have covered this specific category in the past — there’s a highly germane chart that you should check out in there — and we have found one key thing: the directors branch of AMPAS is vastly more global than the Directors Guild of America, and tends to shake off one or two Americans nominated at DGA and swaps in a director with a bit more of a global constituency. Basically, if Villeneuve snags that fifth nomination over Mangold, I ain’t shocked.

I might have a post this season about the shrinking Oscar field, which I tend to attribute to industrial consolidation and shifting strategies around who gets pushed as a contender, with not just films reluctant to run their own cast against one another but now studios meddling in who gets the push. If you know something about this, email me! Anyway, on an unrelated note, Best Actor:

Hey, this is gonna be a really fun category this year:

And, of course, your contenders. The PGA did their standard spray-and-pray nominations strategy, SAG, BAFTA, the DGA and Critics’ Choice are pretty damned aligned, it’ll be fun to see who gets in.

Hey, tell your friends: