Applying Discrete Choice Models to Predict Academy Award Winners

Abstract

Every year since 1928, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognized outstanding achievement in film with their prestigious Academy Award, or Oscar. Before the winners in various categories are announced, there is intense media and public interest in predicting who will come away from the awards ceremony with an Oscar statuette. There are no end of theories about which nominees are most likely to win, yet despite this there continue to be major surprises when the winners are announced. The paper frames the question of predicting the four major awards-picture, director, actor in a leading role and actress in a leading role-as a discrete choice problem. It is then possible to predict the winners in these four categories with a reasonable degree of success. The analysis also reveals which past results might be considered truly surprising-nominees with low estimated probability of winning who have overcome nominees who were strongly favoured to win. Copyright (c) 2008 Royal Statistical Society.

Cinematic success criteria and their predictors: The art and business of the film industry

“…Moreover, of the various awards, the Oscars provide the most reliable index of the overall consensus across organizations (Simonton, 2004b). 2 2 Although movie awards display a high degree of consensus, it is also true that the awards are probably subject to various contaminants, including contagion effects (Collins & Hand, 2006) and "sympathy votes" (Pardoe & Simonton, 2008). These errors are systematic rather than random.…”

“…Amazingly, an outstanding acting performance by a man in a supporting role has more predictive power with respect to best picture honors than an outstanding performance by a woman in a lead role! Finally, some investigators have tried to fathom the factors that predict exceptional acting performances that purport to contribute to cinematic success (e.g., Bennett & Bennett, 1998;Lehman, 1941;Pardoe & Simonton, 2008).…”

By Unanimous Decision? A Second Look At Consensus In The Film Industry

“…This would allow for contagion effects to occur, as mentioned by Pardoe and Simonton (2008). The experts themselves might trust and follow each other when it comes to naming winners.…”

“…This forced the choice for methods which focused on winning or being shortlisted only, rather than looking at that part of the data which shows agreement on not-winning or not-being shortlisted. Simonton and others (Simonton, 2011, Pardoe & Simonton, 2008& Kaplan, 2006. While yet other methods which look at conditional probabilities (does winning an Oscar increase the likelihood of winning a BAFTA) might be helpful in examining the tricky issue of contagion.…”

Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media

“…Snyder, 2005;McKee, 2010;Field, 2007). Third, screenplays are carefully evaluated by many interested parties on numerous dimensions, not the least of which are commercial success and artistic merit (Simonton, 2005;Pardoe & Simonton 2008). Finally, the performance of their authors is discrete and quite unambiguous: more than 15,000 screenplays are registered in the US each year with the Writer's Guild of America but fewer than 700 get "green-lighted" and are subsequently produced (Eliashberg, Elberse, & Enders, 2006).…”