Oscar Predictions: Using Online Engagement to Identify a Dark Horse
Very few things in life are guaranteed. One of them is Julianne Moore’s impending win for Best Actress Sunday. She’s won every major award leading up to the Oscars and is a near-mathematical certainty according to just about every poll and prediction.
And really, who could be upset with that? Moore is one of the best actresses on the planet, and arguably the best actress alive never to win an Oscar. The Academy is sure to fix that Sunday.
Quite a few other awards seem similarly decided already. Patricia Arquette for Best Supporting Actress (Boyhood), J.K. Simmons for Best Supporting Actor (Whiplash) are all locks.
The race for Best Actor is a little harder to read. Here we have what is presumably a two-horse race, with many predicting a win for either Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) or Michael Keaton (Birdman). Recent wins at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) give a slight edge to Redmayne, but in our analysis of online engagement with the nominees, we found an interesting dynamic that could be used to gauge a closer race.
A word about what exactly our team measured:
In the weeks leading up to this year’s ceremony, we analyzed how many page views per story the Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress nominees garnered among audiences online to gauge which nominees have the most pull among audiences. We define this measure as “online attention” or “audience interest.”
Online attention can’t in any way be used to predict how the Academy will vote. Neither can it really tell you who or what audiences think should win at this year’s ceremony (they have polls for that). What online interest can reveal, however, is which nominees have a bit more of the zeitgeist about them.
In our analysis of the Best Actor category we found, for example, that Redmayne’s compatriot Benedict Cumberbatch commands a greater share of attention, leaving Keaton on the outside looking in.
Dark Horse Prediction: Bradley Cooper
Even though Cumberbatch gets a greater share of attention over both Redmayne and Keaton, it’s Cooper who may have the most dark horse potential.
Why Cooper over Cumberbatch? A large part of what makes Cooper a legitimate dark horse candidate is the runaway success of his film, American Sniper. Between the current Chris Kyle murder trial — on whom American Sniper is based — and the film’s ongoing box office success, few movies in 2014 have inspired as much interest or debate as Clint Eastwood’s latest. Next to Boyhood, which won the Golden Globe, and even Birdman, considered to be the major threat to Linklater’s film, it’s not even close. Grounds for an upset?
Dark Horse Prediction: American Sniper
If American Sniper did pull off the upset, it would be one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. But something tells me Boyhood and Birdman fatigue may get the best of enough Oscar voters to make this a closer race than initially thought. And Eastwood’s films have a way of coming out of nowhere; he’s pulled off this kind of upset before, with Million Dollar Baby toppling The Aviator at the 2005 Oscars.
And if, by the most remote of chances, an upset were to occur in the Best Actress category, online engagement points to Rosamund Pike as a worthy contender, even over “America’s Sweetheart” Reese Witherspoon.
Dark Horse Prediction: Rosamund Pike
Fairly or unfairly, it’s a test the Academy faces every year: How much do the films and performers honored at the Academy Awards reflect what’s current in today’s cultural landscape? And should the Oscars in some way be “optimized” for that result?
If they were, we might have a ceremony that hewed closer to, say, the People’s Choice Awards than the great mystery that is the Oscars. But every now and then, in a category here or there, the Academy might consider getting in touch with its zeitgeisty side.
And so, a recap of online attention vs. the frontrunners in the race:
All the speculation will end, of course, come Sunday 7:00pm ET (or more precisely, at around 10:00pm when all the major awards start to be announced). We’ll see how well online engagement can pick a dark horse then.
