It's award season again and today we're talking about the Golden Globes?
Why the heck should we care about them?
Well where else do you get to see the rampant alcoholism of Hollywood?
Or the positive effects of valium?
Or more alcohol?
And that's not even counting good old Katniss Everstique!
But seriously with everyone stoned out of their minds at this thing, this is is SO much more entertaining than the Oscars!
*crickets chirping*
Hello Internet! Welcome to FILM Theory!
Proudly nominated for best speculation in a leading role!
So let's just cut right to the chase.
Award shows can be pretty dumb like
one award show giving an award to another award show
whose crew is working on the current award show presenting the award levels of dumb.
But hey, I still watch 'em. Because let's be honest:
What else am I gonna sarcastically live-tweet about on a Sunday night?
But outside of the enormously rich creating an event that hypes up their own height,
I also like watching these things to figure out their patterns, break the game.
Like say for instance that one time I did a two-part episode on how to hack the Oscars,
and said that the reason Leonardo DiCaprio didn't win on his first four nominations was that he was too young,
since the vast majority of Best Actor Awards go to men over the age of forty.
And wouldn't you know it a year after I uploaded that video Leo happens to pull out the win for The Revenant
At the ripe old age of forty-one.
Nailed it!
You may not have thanked me out loud during your speech or on Twitter
Or have responded to literally the thousands of tweets you were getting about my video being right Leo,
But in my heart I knew.
I KNEW.
Anyway, those videos were about how to make movies that are Oscar-winners.
Obviously helpful to my pal and loyal theorist, Leo Dicap,
But probably not to most of you watching.
So this year we're doing something a bit more practical.
Sure you might not walk away with a gold statue but you'll get something even better,
Cash straight out of your boss's pocket.
And that's the sweetest cash of all.
So after a year FULL of bad predictions
Proposing today is that this group in Rogue One turns into THIS group from the sequel trilogy.
Let's start 2017 off right by giving you the tools you need...
to hack the Oscars.
Now when I started doing my homework on this episode,
I expected to talk a lot about how studying the Golden Globes would be the best way to get your Oscars pics in order.
I mean it IS the first major award show of the season
And next to the Oscars, is by far the most-watched of any of the big movie awards.
But just goin' in and plugging the Golden Globe winners into your Oscar pool comes with some big risks.
First, credit where credit is due.
The Golden Globes are really good at picking out Best Actor and Best Actress awards.
In the last twenty years, seventy percent of Best Actor Oscar-winners
also won a Golden Globe Award for that performance.
For Best Actress, that number shoots up to a whopping ninety percent.
And there are other categories that have a really high correlation between Oscar wins and Golden Globe wins as well.
Like screenplay at eighty percent.
Now at first those may seem like huge numbers,
and granted they are,
but they're also a bit misleading.
You see the Academy Awards and Golden Globes don't give out these awards the same way.
Sure seventy percent of Best Actors and ninety percent of Best Actresses at the Oscars
also won themselves a Golden Globe.
But that's because they had TWO shots to do it.
The Golden Globe splits its leading actor categories into comedies and dramas.
So while it is highly likely that one of those two actors or actresses is going to win the Academy Award,
how to do you know which of the two?
Is it a fifty-fifty chance? Flip a coin?
Pfft. That don't fly here.
And for screenplays its the opposite problem.
One Oscar is given for Best Original Screenplay, and one is given for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Whereas the Golden Globes just gives out one for screenplay.
And all those technical awards that make or break your prediction list,
Like cinematography, sound mixing, film editing?
Not here my friends.
And the last problem and probably the biggest one
is that the Golden Globes have gotten worse in predicting over the years.
From 1983 to 2003 one of the Golden Globe film winners for either Best Comedy or Best Drama,
went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, eighteen out of twenty-one times.
It's a very respectable eighty-six percent of the time.
In the twelve years since though,
it's dropped to thirty-three percent.
And it's basically making two guesses every year!
That SUCKS.
But it's also a really weird trend right?
To go from being so good at guessing to performing less than chance?
So what's happening here?
Well, we frankly chose that the taste of the American industry are becoming more and more different
from the tastes of the rest of the world.
The Golden Globes are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press,
a group of journalists and photographers that reports on the entertainment industry,
for sites outside of the U.S.
The Academy, on the other hand,
consists of about six thousand six hundred people.
Mostly US-based, historically ninety percent white, and all being film industry professionals
with most still being active in making movies.
But it's also worth noting that this year,
it's six thousand six hundred.
That extra six-hundred is noteworthy.
Because those six hundred were added just this year
in response to all the complaints about a lack of diversity in the Academy.
Is that enough to sway the votes?
Probably not.
But you are going to start to see things shift away from the old guard
and the Academy probably over-correct for the sins of the last couple years.
Anyway tl;dr, the Golden Globes are fun and all to see Jack Nicholson hopped up on valium,
but if you're serious about winning your Oscar pool,
you're gonna have to go a lot deeper than that.
So where does that mean we should turn?
Well.
I looked at the past twenty years of awards handed out
by the Screen Actors' Guild, Writers' Guild of America, Directors' Guild of America, Producers' Guild of America
BAFTA, Satellite Awards, Critics' Choice, National Society of Film Critics, Online Film Critics Society,
New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Whoo!
If I never have to write the name "Meryl Streep" into an Excel spreadsheet again,
I will die a happy man.
Obviously there was a TON of data to wade through
so I'm gonna give you the cliffnotes and tell you the three biggest lessons learned about Oscar predictibility
from this little data analysis project I did.
Number one, trust the guilds.
In that laundry list of award shows I just rattled of, you heard four guilds mentioned:
the Screen Actors' Guild, the Directors' Guild of America, the Producer's Guild of America, and the Writers' Guild of America.
These awards largely go under the radar,
but they shouldn't.
Each one of them was the single best predictor of the awards that they specialize in.
The Screen Actors' Guild predicted the Best Actor Award eighty percent of the time
and the Best Actress Award seventy five percent of the time;
the Writers' Guild selected the ultimate winner for Adapted and Original Screenplay
at a rate of seventy percent each;
the Directors' Guild picked the Best Director Oscar winner eighty-five percent of the time;
-well ahead of ANY of the other award shows-
and THE most accurate predictor for Best Picture
is an award you probably didn't even know existed, the Producers' Guild of America Award at seventy percent.
This all makes sense right?
They're focused on the American voting block and they're all specialized in their individual categories.
Logic.
Lesson number two, ignore the critics.
In my data analysis, I mentioned that I included the pics of several critics associations
and ooo-eee Mr. Poopy Butthole was that a waste of time.
The New York Film Critics Circle, L.A. Film Critics Association, Online Film Critics Society
and National Society of Film Critics are not only very redundant in what they've named their organizations,
but are also VERY unreliable across the board.
NONE!
None of those four award shows pick the Oscar-winner in ANY category more than HALF the time.
ANY CATEGORY!
And their Best Picture pics were especially bad.
The Los Angeles Film Critics Society picked the Best Picture Oscar-winner TWICE in the last twenty years.
Seriously.
We must have some bitter failed filmmakers in the L.A. Film Critics Society
because with a ten percent accuracy rate,
it seems they are intentionally trying to go against the grain!
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
We got some hipsters over here! Hipster Alert!
That said there is one exception.
The Critics' Choice Awards are actually surprisingly good
at picking Best Cinematography, which it's done eighty five percent of the time,
and Best Original Screenplay, which it only missed once
in the eleven times that it's handed out the award.
So when it comes to those more obscure categories
that's a good one to reference.
Which brings us to lesson number three: Award shows themselves aren't enough.
Sure seventy percent accuracy rating for a given category
is pretty good, but as any of you who watch our GTLIVE livestreams know:
I'm not a big fan of losing.
NO! I HIT THE DOT! I HIT IT! I HIT IT!
And I want YOU to be confident!
That you're finally gonna get some bragging rights over Bill from accounting.
He is so smug.
Screw you Bill! You and your... accounting!
Whatever accountants have. A computer!
Gah! That's too general... Your calculator! Yeah!
That got him, got him good.
But seriously you guys can relate right?
Every office, school, classroom whatever has that, like, one film hipster.
Oh! I can't believe that they snubbed this obscure Iranian foreign film!
Well screw them!
This is our time to shine.
Today, I set out to give you THE best way to make your predictions.
The best odds to have the ability to rub it in those film hipster faces
and dang it I intend to deliver!
Luckily the best answer to this problem is the answer that I use for practically every problem these days:
the Internet.
That may seem vague but stick with me.
The digital age has really changed
the amount of data that we can collect on what people are thinking, and as a result
the likeliest outcomes of things that people have to decide.
If you're just looking for other award shows and how predictive THEY are,
then you only really have a few data points to go off of for predicting any one award.
But some analysts are starting to create new models to predict the Academy Awards
that consider thousands, if not millions, of data points.
Take, for instance, my favorite short form sarcasm generator and meme filter:
Twitter.
Last year, a data scientist named Paul Singman ventured to make a model that predicted the Oscars
based off the volume of Twitter mentions and rankings of how positive they were.
Sure it wasn't perfect,
but Singman's model got a lot of the awards right.
Like Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Score and Best Animated Feature.
And that was the models first ever test try.
With more results added to the model to see what it got right and what it got wrong from last year,
it's highly likely that his model this year is gonna be even more accurate.
Still, even Singman's model missed what was probably the biggest upset of last year:
Best Picture.
Picking The Revenant over the actual winner of Spotlight.
But seriously, everyone missed that one.
In fact, Spotlight actually became the first film in over sixty years to win Best Picture
while only winning one other award.
In analyzing all these different strategies, it was the biggest outlaw trying to account for.
How do you predict the unpredictable?
I mean seriously, did ANYBODY see that win for Spotlight coming?
Well yes, but not someone, something.
It took a lot of research and a lot of trial-and-error but I finally found it.
Skynet. I mean sorry, Google.
Google. Google's what I meant.
A quick look at the Google trends data for the search terms The Revenant, The Big Short and Spotlight
starting at the beginning of 2016, shows us an interesting pattern.
In all of those graphs we see a big spike in the week of February 28th and that's to be expected,
since that's when the Oscars were handed out.
But it's the shape of the graph in January and early February that's the most interesting.
Both The Revenant and The Big Short came into 2016 with very hot search traffic,
but then cooled down significantly the couple of weeks leading up to the Oscars.
Spotlight, on the other hand, started very flat but gradually grew,
consistently growing in search traffic through the first six weeks of 2016.
It's plausible that these models of search traffic mirror the behavior of the Academy voters.
If voters for the Oscars checked out The Big Short and The Revenant while they were hot in search traffic in early January,
it's likely that they were watching films that recieved fewer accolades, like Spotlight, a bit closer to they time that they were actually voting.
The couple of weeks right before the big awards.
Thereby making them subject to our good old friend, the recency effect.
A psychological phenomenon which states that we are more likely to remember and prefer things
that we have seen or watched more recently.
So while The Big Short and The Revenant were distant memories in the voters' minds
having just seen Spotlight,
that's the one they vote for.
Put simply, you don't want your movie to be losing steam as it heads into the Oscars.
Because the two weeks before the ceremony, is when the voting really happens.
So here we are, this is it.
This is the moment.
Bill from accounting is headed down the hall, waving that Oscar valet
in his grubby little hands, looking as cocky as always.
Thoughts of that Iranian documentary running through his head.
What are you going to do to wipe that grin off his face?
Let me tell ya: step one, follow the guilds.
Look up the winners from each respective guild and mark them off.
Add in some of the categories that we mentioned from the Critics' Choice.
Step two: double-check your choices with Twitter trends.
And step three: before you turn in your ballet the Friday before the Oscars,
double-check Google trends to see if any underdogs have been gaining in search.
And finally step four: watch the ceremony and celebrate as the points come rolling in.
And when Monday morning rolls around, rub your astute choice of best foreign film documentary
in Bill's face.
Because at the end of the day, who cares which multi-millionare walked away with a golden statue?
All that matters is you, winning bragging rights for the next year.
SCREW YOU BILL! You and your calculator!
Just because it has subtitles doesn't make it good.