Need help with Oscar predictions? Social media companies and tracking firms are falling over each other to position their websites, apps and infographics as surefire ways to forecast who will go home with this year’s gold statues.
Not all methodologies are equal. Maybe the most these tools can do is give you amunition for watercooler chatter instead of giving you an edge in your office Oscar pool.
Tom O’Neil, who helped get the trend started in 2000 with the launch of his Gold Derby website, told TheWrap that the competition among companies trying to make sense of the Oscar race has never been fiercer.
“I expected some kind of upsurge with the arrival of the internet, but I’m absolutely flabbergasted by how many more people are in this space,” he said.
Gold Derby uses an algorithm and draws on critics’ predictions to try to forecast the race. Many new sites and apps have a less scientific approach.
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The brand company General Sentiment, for instance, uses social media activity around actors and films to predict who is ahead in the contest. That’s a novel idea, but sadly Twitter activity has little to do with how the Oscars are actually decided.
The annual awards show is voted on by the organization’s 5,765 members, not by the general public.
Not that every Oscar sage is trying to figure out who will go home happy on Sunday night.
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Sites such as IMDB are drawing on their vast user base to capture how popular various Oscar nominees are with film fans. It does not claim to have a formula for predicting who will win best actor or actress.
“This is just another fun way to skew the data,” Keith Simanton, managing editor of IMDB, told TheWrap.
Here’s a brief description of some of the ways companies are promising to help Oscar fans beat the odds or, at the very least, find out if Twitter really, really likes Max von Sydow.
The old man in the game. Gold Derby pools the top experts from publications and sites like Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, the site's editors, and its users to try to come to a consensus about who is in the lead going into Oscar night.
Predictions are listed in a number of charts, and are aggregated into racetrack odds and percentages. O’Neil said that by combining all of the different expert predictions into one algorithmic souffle, the site has a better track record than any one Oscar prognosticator.
Crafted by business analytics site MicroStrategy, this new Facebook app breaks down the demographic data among fans of this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated films.
