I am very certain that The Aviator will win.

Best Director, I think, will go to Eastwood or Payne.

I just don't see how they can snub Marty yet again for a personal award like Best Director, if they name The Aviator Best Picture. That would be a slap in the face to him. That's why I think they would reward him as a director before they would name Aviator as BP, especially with MDB being so well recieved, and the Eastwood snub last year. It legitimizes their politics to the unsuspecting, and makes for a satisfying result.

But the thing is that I don't believe in only politics being decisive. I don't believe that since Scorcse lost for Gangs of New York
I think they will award The Aviator just because it is a "bigger" and more successful film, a much bigger undertaking. Best Director, I think, they'll give to Eastwood because he was snubbed last year and delivered two great films in a row or to Payne because he actually was THAT good (even though I think, they'll probably just award him Best Screenplay).

Marty will win BD and the aviator will win BP,million dollar baby will only win Best supporting actor.

I agree. Marty will win before Aviator does.

At this point, MArty's statue is pretty damn well guaranteed.

Best Picture is REALLY up in the air.
I SERIOUSLY think it could go anyway...
The could do their usual and just award it to the most glamorous and Hollywood-Oscar type movie
They could go underdog and award it to the movie that seems as though it was a gem from the past
or they could turn heads and award the first ever independent film!!

True, it's hard to overcome the Academy stereotype win (Aviator) but I can actually see MDB or sideways winning; moreso, The Aviator, but the important thing is I can actually picture the others winning.

If neither of the three wins, it'll be a huge surprise...

Just imagine the upset if say Finding Neverland or Ray wins!!!!!!!

If Finding Neverland wins you can bet you will never hear from me again. I will become Amish, move to a large gated and walled village and try to forget that "motion pictures" ever happened.

YOU HEAR THAT HOLLYWOOD!!! THAT'S A THREAT!

Paul Giamatti not being nominated for Best Actor IMO rules Sideways out for Best Picture. It is between Aviator and Million Dollar Baby now

Right now I see Aviator winning Picture, though with such a tossup Sideways could pull a huge upset.

Scorsese will finally win in 2007.

With what?

The Departed.

Final, locked up prediction: The Best Picture Oscar will go to Million Dollar Baby.

You can bring this post up and laugh at me if I'm wrong.

You don't really think that you're the one they'll be laughing at, do you? :razz:

I won't be laughing at anybody who thinks The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby or Sideways can win it.

Ray and Finding Neverland... hehe...

Well, I saw The Aviator some weeks ago and I have to say that it would be a deserving winner! Nevertheless, I didn't see Million $ Baby, Sideways and all the rest (release dates here are different and I have to wait a bit to see them) - so all I can do is speculate and this is how it goes:

Best Picture and Best Director will go to Million $ Baby and Eastwood. Why? All I can say is: its just a feeling, a feeling which tells me that Scorsese will go down as one of the those directors who made lots of brilliant movies, but never won Best Picture for just one of them!

The Oscar Formula

By CONOR DOUGHERTY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 25, 2005; Page W1

Donn Pickett thinks he knows which movie will win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Hoping to snag bragging rights and a $200 gift certificate from his office Oscar pool, Mr. Pickett scoured reviews, watched all five nominees, then whittled his choices to "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Aviator ."

So what strategy did he use? "Pure hunch," says the San Francisco lawyer. "My gut tells me they're going to go with 'Million Dollar Baby.' "


It's Oscar weekend again, when more than 40 million Americans will endure hours of acceptance speeches and song-and-dance numbers to learn which movie lands the film world's most coveted prize -- Best Motion Picture. Everyone from studio executives and bookmakers to casual fans has a theory about what makes a winner. Actor Tom Skerritt likes "Million Dollar Baby" because it packs an emotional wallop. Film producer Peter Guber says it'll be "The Aviator ," in part because director Martin Scorsese hasn't ever won a best-picture statuette. Then there's Robin Kenny, who works in a Phoenix advertising office: She picked "Sideways" for her office pool because, she says, "I have to go with what I enjoy."

But we wondered if there could be a more methodical way to predict the outcome. After all, the year's top film will be determined by essentially the same Hollywood types -- roughly 5,800 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- who mark ballots every year. We decided to look for patterns in past voting and see if they could be turned into a useful mathematical model.

The result: The Weekend Journal Oscar Formula. It may not be the Pythagorean theorem, but it's pretty impressive. Over the last two decades, the model correctly picked 18 out of 20 Best Picture winners -- a full 90%. So what happened when we ran the numbers on this year's nominees? According to the formula, the Oscar for Best Picture goes to ...

We'll get to that in a moment.

First, a little song and dance -- about how we did it. We started by researching all the Best Picture nominees and winners since 1984, 100 movies in all. We examined various aspects of each one, trying to see whether there were particular factors that seemed to show up consistently in winners, or losers. Then we narrowed these variables down to about two dozen, including such things as a film's run time and release date to the total number of Academy Award nominations it received. We also looked at whether the movie included war, history or sports themes. Just out of curiosity, we even tallied which movies included a tormented genius, a lead actor from a British Commonwealth country, or a main character who mounts a horse. (Remember "Braveheart"?)


Armed with a spreadsheet of raw data -- some 2,400 entries in all -- we turned to Andrew Bernard, an economics professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. We picked Prof. Bernard in part because he has used statistical models to predict things like how many medals various countries would win at the 2004 Olympics. (He and a colleague came within three medals for 23 of the 34 countries they tracked.) To crunch our numbers, Prof. Bernard used what math jocks call a "binary probit" model, a common statistical method that determines which group of factors correlate most closely with a certain outcome, and to what degree.

Predicting Oscar winners is more than academic, of course. While it's generally illegal in the U.S. to organize Oscar betting for profit, many offshore companies take wagers on the contest. In London, bookmaker Ladbrokes says it expects bets to exceed £200,000, or about $380,000. And across the U.S., offices and Oscar parties engage in friendly wagers where stakes include cash, if not pride and dignity. At the San Francisco office of law firm Bingham McCutchen, where Mr. Pickett is a senior partner, Monday's post-Oscar party will include vintage movie posters, a running projection of Sunday's awards show -- and an acceptance speech that the office-pool champion gives in front of about 300 co-workers.

So how do the big betting houses figure their favorites? Gambling on the Oscars is illegal in Nevada, but at Bally's in Las Vegas, race and sports-book director John Avello says he sets Oscar odds for entertainment purposes. He talks to Hollywood insiders -- "my people," he calls them -- whose opinions he says account for about 60% of his choice. He then tracks each film's victories at the Golden Globe and Producers Guild awards, and also factors in the total number of Academy Award nominations a film receives. This year, Mr. Avello's method singles out "The Aviator " for the victory. "It has all the components," he says.

For the Weekend Journal formula, Prof. Bernard looked for mathematical patterns in the factors we had picked -- and quickly weeded most of them out. The length of the film or its release date, he said, proved unreliable in predicting a winner. He also found no significant correlation between winning films and story lines that involve -- sorry, "Million Dollar Baby" -- sports or the death of a main character.

The 'Titanic' Effect

But Prof. Bernard did help us isolate three factors that correlated highly with Oscar success. First, past Best Picture winners commonly garnered high numbers of overall Oscar nominations -- with each nomination increasingly tipping the balance in a film's favor. Second, winners also tended to be those films that had won multiple Golden Globes. Finally, the model held bad news for fans of "Sideways": Academy voters don't like comedies. In the past 20 years not one of 10 comedies nominated has captured the big award. (We used the genre classifications of online movie-rental service Netflix, which classifies "Working Girl" and "The Full Monty" as comedies but "Shakespeare in Love" as a romance.)

Next, Prof. Bernard combined the three factors in a formula, which included weightings for each element and an impressive-looking array of those Greek letters that always show up in physics textbooks. This formula isolated a single film with the highest winning probability over the past 20 years, one that would theoretically have beaten all other 99 nominees. It was 1997's "Titanic," a drama with 14 Oscar nominations and four Golden Globe wins, which beat out "Good Will Hunting" and "L.A. Confidential," each with nine nominations and one Golden Globe.

The 1984 race reveals a closer competition: "A Passage to India" would have handily topped most nominee slates, but that year it lost the statuette to a film with a narrow statistical edge. The final tally: 11 Oscar nominations and three Golden Globes for "Passage," and 11 Oscar nominations and four Golden Globes for "Amadeus." ("Amadeus" is tied with "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," according to our model, for the second-highest "Oscar-win" correlation over the past two decades.)

To some degree, the formula can be explained by taking a look at how Hollywood awards voting works. A movie that cleans up at the Golden Globes, of course, has proven itself in one popularity contest already. The total number of Academy Award nominations is also important. That stems from the rules of Oscar voting. Academy members are divided into a variety of fields, such as directors, actors and producers. Voters nominate in their field -- that is, actors determine the nominees in the four acting categories, while screenwriters nominate screenplays. However, all voting members are also allowed to nominate for Best Picture. When it comes time for the final balloting, then, the movie that has nabbed the most nominations in different categories has, in theory, the widest backing of Hollywood camps.

Of course, our formula isn't perfect. For 1991, our model suggested the race should have been between "Beauty and the Beast" and "Bugsy." Instead, the year's winner was "Silence of the Lambs." Oops: Our model considered "Lambs" not only a long shot for that year, but also assigned it the lowest "Oscar-win" factor of any winning film of the past 20 years.

Likewise, no model can predict the future. To paraphrase the mutual-fund industry, past performance is no guarantee of future results. That said, Prof. Bernard notes that because Academy voter behavior was predictable over the past 20 years -- Messrs. Skerritt and Guber are both longtime members -- patterns among this particular universe of voters may be useful in explaining how they'll behave in the future. "There's no evidence that the way the Academy votes for Best Picture has changed over time," he says. "So this model should be as accurate today as it was 20 years ago."

Prof. Bernard preferred his three-factor formula, saying it was elegant and streamlined. Yet when he reworked the formula to include a couple of our plot devices (hero on a horse, character with a disability), he came up with a model that pegged the winner in 19 of the past 20 years. This model gave a slight edge to films with horse-riding heroes and a slight disadvantage to those with a disabled main character. So while our three-variable formula incorrectly pegged "Born on the Fourth of July" as the winner of 1989's top honors, when we factored in the disability of Tom Cruise's Vietnam veteran character, the formula spit out the year's actual winner, "Driving Miss Daisy." (Prof. Bernard cautions that these two factors' influence aren't statistically significant, and that the five-variable model is unlikely to outperform the three-variable model over time.)

We phoned up a few other statisticians to describe our methodology, and they said it was sound. The Academy, for its part, said it wasn't surprised by its 90% accuracy. "It's that other 10% that makes it interesting," says Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Slim Chance for 'Ray'

As for this year's winner: Because of the formula's anti-comedy bias, "Sideways" appears to be the ultimate long shot. Two other slim bets are "Finding Neverland," with seven Oscar nominations but no Golden Globe wins, and "Ray," with six nominations and one Golden Globe win. Slightly better odds go to Mr. Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby," with two Golden Globe wins in addition to its seven Oscar nominations.

The envelope, please. According to Weekend Journal's Oscar Formula, Mr. Scorsese's "The Aviator " is the runaway favorite, with 11 Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe wins. That gives it an 85% probability of winning, according to the model, ahead of "Million Dollar Baby," with 13.2%. Should a movie other than "The Aviator " walk away with Best Picture, it would be the biggest upset -- by our reckoning, anyway -- of the past 20 years.

As for Mr. Bernard's own preference for winning film? He's not in a position to answer. "I haven't seen any of them yet."

Interesting formula, but I think I don't need a forumla to consider a movie with most GG wins and most Oscar nominations a frontrunner, heh.