Looking back, it's notable that, of the four acting winners, Michael B. Jordan was the only one some predicted would be snubbed of a nomination altogether. Eric and Nathaniel had him out of their final five in our first round of predictions. Look at him now!
The Oscars are over, and the next week of posts here, at The Film Experience, shall be dedicated to saying goodbye to the season that was before looking forward to the cinematic year that’s still just starting. One of the first matters to resolve is that of the team's predictions. Every year, we compete to see who’s most accurate out of the lot, both at the nominations and winners’ stages. Last year, Eric was the most accurate pundit at guessing the nominations, but Lynn Lee beat him in predicting the right victors. This year, Baby Clyde was the best of us all at sussing out who AMPAS would nominate. However, wins-wise, a new champion has been crowned. Or maybe two. Let me explain…
1) Juan Carlos Ojano – 16/21 – 76.2% accuracy
2-3) Cláudio Alves & Nathaniel R – 18/24 – 75.5% accuracy
4) Ben Miller – 18/24 – 74.5% accuracy
5) Abe Friedtanzer – 18/24 – 73.5% accuracy
6) Eric Blume – 17/24 – 71.4% accuracy
7-8) Baby Clyde & Nick Taylor – 15/21 – 71.4% accuracy
9) Eurocheese – 14/21 – 66.7% accuracy
Okay, so there’s a lot to go over here. This year brought many complications in determining a sole winner among the team. As always, some people chose to risk it all on the shorts, while others left those persnickety categories out of the equation. Usually, that would just require me to calculate each pundit's accuracy percentage in their chosen categories, evening out the field while still potentially rewarding those bold enough to guess the shorts. Except, there was a tie in Best Live-Action Short, which meant folks with different predictions still had the same right result. Moreover, this left us with four people tied together – myself, Nathaniel, Ben, and Abe.
So, I decided on adding half a point to those who correctly predicted one of the winners in that category and ALSO picked the other winner as runner-up. Since Ben predicted A Friend of Dorothy with The Singers as runner-up and Two People Exchanging Saliva in fourth place, I only gave him a quarter of a point. It makes sense in my head! Anyway, this leaves only Nathaniel and me tied to the folks who predicted the shorts. Which is pretty much immaterial, since even then, Juan Carlos Ojano still beats us percentage-wise, having predicted 16 out of 21 feature film categories. At some point, I tried to give 0.5 points to folks who correctly predicted a runner-up and 0.3 to those who put the eventual winner in third place, which would make me the winner, followed by Juan Carlos and then Ben, but that felt a tad unfair. Such a result would mostly stem from stuff like Nathaniel having Jordan and Penn at #3 in their acting races, among other things. Anyway, in that final ranking, the reason Eric is above Baby Clyde and Nick is that he predicted the shorts and technically got two more right, so I think that should break the percentage tie between the three.
You know, I hate ties in these Team Experience things, but I think I hate the migraine I got from trying to devise a fair process to calculate this thing even more.
So, let’s pretend nobody predicted the shorts, that there were no actual Oscar ties to consider, and I used the same method as last year, when Lynn, who declined to participate this season, won, and these tie-breakers were done on the basis of who had put the eventual winner as their runner-up. In that case, the results would be…
1) Ben Miller – 16/21
2-3) Cláudio Alves & Abe Friedtanzer – 16/21
4) Juan Carlos Ojano – 16/21
5-7) Eric Blume & Baby Clyde & Nick Taylor – 15/21
8) Nathaniel R – 15/21
9) Eurocheese – 14/21
In this case, Ben wins, as in the feature categories, every Oscar champion was either his pick or runner-up. Abe ranked Jordan #3 in Best Actor, and I foolishly did the same for Sentimental Value in International Film, which led to the tie-breaker for first place. Juan Carlos, on the other hand, ranked One Battle After Another at #3 in Casting and did the same to Mr. Nobody Against Putin in Documentary. Of the six categories he missed, Nathaniel only put the eventual winner in the runner-up position in Picture, Original Song, and International Feature, leaving him the Eric, Baby Clyde, and Nick throuple.
So, after all these silly calculations, I guess Juan Carlos and Ben can share the throne, our kings of Oscar punditry for the season.
But you know who beat all of these individuals? The collective, of course. In the Team Experience prediction charts, I included the aggregated result for each category, and this groupthink barometer got 19 out of 24 categories right. In future years, maybe we should look at that little red box in the corner of the charts for punditry wisdom. Though maybe not in Best Casting, since every member of the team got that one wrong – the only race where that happened.
Alright, that’s enough punditry nonsense. This next week will be about celebrating what happened at Oscar night and starting to look ahead. In the meantime, let us know how well you did in your own predictions. Sound off in the comments.