How To Predict The Oscars
The Oscar goes to…whoever fits these trends.
For the last 30 years, predicting who the Oscar goes to has been easy. There seem to be distinct similarities in the winners for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress. In fact, many websites have composed their own templates that visually illustrate this predictability. They compile previous Oscar winners, sometimes dating as far back as the 1900’s, and organize them into different categories.
Bloomberg Business provides an interactive visual model that takes previous winners and stacks them together under categories such as race, age, prior nods, and prior wins.
Chris Wilson from Time breaks down Best Picture winners according to certain themes and other keywords taken from IMDB (such as characters, locations, and patterns) that they all have in common.
For Best Picture, Oscar winners are generally dramas well-received by critics and, more specifically, they’re liberation stories. As Omer M. Mozaffar explains,
The Oscar goes to a film that involves someone in some sort of prison, seeking and achieving some sort of freedom, though death often takes place in the process (along with some sort of love interest, usually).
This liberation theme occurs in winners across decades. In 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) seeks out a girl kidnapped by a serial killer while trying to silence the crying lambs that haunt her from the past. In Last years Birdman, Riggan (played by Micahel Keaton) is an actor struggling to create a Broadway play while battling his own ego and attempting to recover his career, family, and himself.
For Best Actor or Best Actress, Oscar winners are also liberators. Not only are the actor’s or actress’s performances decidedly the most visceral and compelling, but the characters they play often struggle and push against an un-accepting, challenging, and hostile world. Other winning trends include age, playing a real person, and physical transformation.
Best Actress winners are usually under the age of 40. In 2012, Jennifer Lawrence won at the age of 22 for Silver Linings Playbook, and Brie Larson (26) is a front-runner this year for her performance in Room. For Best Actor, it’s the opposite. A majority of winners are in their 40’s. Adrien Brody is the only Best Actor to win before the age of 30 for his performance in The Pianist. This condition will be further exemplified should Leonardo DiCaprio (now 41) win Best Actor for The Revenant.
Historical figures and biopics are Oscar gold. The biggest group of Best Actor winners over the last few decades and 7 of the last 10 Best Actresses, have played real people. Mathew McConaughey, 2013’s Best Actor for Dallas Buyers Club, played real-life Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof and Helen Mirren, 2006’s Best Actress, played Queen Elizabeth II.
Undergoing a physical transformation seems to be the most predominant trend in Oscar winning performances, especially in Best Actors. In order to to fit the roles they are playing and make their performances more real and authentic, actors and actresses will sometimes undergo extremes such as losing/gaining weight or playing a character with a physical impairment. They significantly stand out from the others, going above and beyond, and their remarkable feats make them prime Oscar-bait.
Charlize Theron wore liquid latex and had freckles airbrushed on her face for her Oscar-winning role in Monster (2003).
Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds to play Jake LaMotta in the boxing classic, Raging Bull.
Mathew McConaughey lost an enormous amount of weight, surviving on a Diet Coke, egg whites, and a piece of chicken a day.
Previous Oscar winners have so often passed this test of undergoing a physical transformation, that they’re becoming more and more predictable based on this trend alone. If a nominated actor or actress has gone to physical extremes for their performance, and evokes such responses as, “I barely recognized him,” or, “look how much weight he lost,” it’s a safe bet he/she will win.
During the next Oscars, look for similarities in the winners compared to previous ones. I guarantee they’ll be there. Why winners in Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress follow these trends is another topic of debate. Nevertheless, they make the Oscars as predictable as ever.
