History says Oppenheimer is likely to win Best Picture at the 2024 Oscars

A statistical analysis of historical data

Four years ago, I introduced a statistical model that I used to predict which movie would win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The model gave the film 1917 the highest chance but the Academy bucked historical trends and chose Parasite as the winner. In the last three years, the historical model gave Nomadland, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All at Once the nod respectively, and the Academy followed through.

This year’s Academy Awards will be held on Sunday March 10, 2024. Ten films were nominated for Best Picture: American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest. Below I explain which movie should win the big prize based on historical data.

The Three Strongest Predictors of Best Picture Winners

Just as a reminder, I created a dataset of every Best Picture nominee since 1989 (220+ films). I collected data on each film’s budget (in 2022 dollars), the number of total Oscar nominations it received, the length of the film (in minutes), whether the film won the Directors Guild of America’s (DGA) award for “Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film”, whether the film won the Producers Guild of America’s (PGA) “Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures”, whether the film won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Award, whether the film won the British Academy Film Awards for Best Film, and whether the film won Best Picture during the Oscars. I also included 34 control variables for each Oscar ceremony, since each year is unique.

I ran a probit model to see which film characteristics are strong predictors of winning Best Picture. Of the seven predictors, three have a statistically significant effect on winning the award. Those three predictors are as follows:

1. DGA Outstanding Directorial Achievement Winner: The analysis shows that a film that wins this award has a 26% chance of winning Best Picture (holding all other variables at their means). Oppenheimer won the DGA award this year.
2. PGA Outstanding Producer Winner: The analysis shows that a film that wins this award has a 29% chance of winning Best Picture (holding all other variables at their means). Oppenheimer won the PGA award this year.
3. SAG Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Winner: The analysis shows that a film that wins this award has a 31% chance of winning Best Picture (holding all other variables at their means). Oppenheimer won the SAG award this year.

For those who are curious about the effects of the other variables, I found that expensive films (budget) and BAFTA winners were less likely to win the award, and longer films (in minutes) and those with the most Oscar nominations were more likely to win. However, these results were not statistically significant. Note: The variable for the Number of Oscars Nominations was statistically significant in the past (in the first three forecasts that I did).

Probabilities for the 2024 Best Picture Awards

I calculated the probability that a film with the same characteristics as the 2024 nominees has of winning the award. The percentages are based on combinations of the three predictors above (DGA win, PGA win, and SAG win).

The percentages below are the probabilities that each individual film wins the Best Picture award in isolation and not in comparison to the other films. Therefore the probabilities will not add up to 100%.

So without further ado here are the predictions for this year’s Best Picture Awards.

Oppenheimer won the top DGA, PGA, and SAG awards. The film has an 87.9% chance of winning. Confidence Interval: 70–100%.

The remaining films all have a small chance of winning, 2.5% each.

Overview

As we all know, the Academy is made up of film industry people, not historical film data, but if history is our guide it looks like Oppenheimer has the best shot of winning. We’ll see what happens on Sunday, March 10!