Predicting This Year’s Oscar Winners Using Just Math

Best Picture

I could save a few characters by listing the awards that Oppenheimer didn’t win rather than the awards it did. The math is hesitant to let any nominee get above 80 percent, due to a history of some famous upsets in this category and the presence of ten nominees. But audiences and critics alike were deeply impressed by the epic World War II biopic, and Academy members are probably about to add their names to that list.

Best Director

Most of the discourse around this category has centered on who’s missing: Greta Gerwig, for Barbie. I too was surprised to see her name missing from the list of five. In the end, though, Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) had such a dominant run through awards season that this was likely going to be his year no matter which four fellow nominees joined him at the Dolby Theatre.

Best Actor

The Golden Globes initially set up a terrific head-to-head race between Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers). They remain the top two, but don’t confuse the phrase “top two” with “it’s a coin toss.” Murphy’s BAFTA and SAG wins, along with Oppenheimer’s overall awards season momentum, gives us a genuine favorite in this race, even if Giamatti is still very much in the running.

Best Actress

Unlike best actor, this one actually is a coin-toss. It’s quite reminiscent of a year ago, when Michelle Yeoh won the SAG, Cate Blanchett won the BAFTA and Critics Choice Awards, and they split the Golden Globes. Yeoh won the Oscar. This year, Lily Gladstone has Yeoh’s resume, and Emma Stone has Blanchett’s. Two things make Gladstone a slightly stronger candidate than Yeoh: First, the model adjusts every year, so last year’s data in favor of Yeoh’s resume is taken into account. Second, they won opposite Golden Globe categories, which helps Gladstone since the drama category is more predictive of the Oscar.

Best Supporting Actor

The supporting categories are much clearer than the lead categories this year. Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer) has waited an awful long time for this one. Thirty-one years after his first acting nomination for Chaplin, he now sits at a 91 percent chance to finally reach the stage.

Best Supporting Actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), at just over 91 percent, is the single most likely winner of the entire night, in any category, just barely ahead of Robert Downey Jr. Her moving portrayal of a grieving mother is going to be enough to win the film best supporting actress. An unanswerable question: would it also have been enough to win her film best casting over Oppenheimer had that new category been introduced a couple years earlier?

Best Original Screenplay

This race is as strange as they come. First, the writer’s strike delayed the Writers Guild Awards until after the Oscars. Second, the Academy classified Barbie as an adapted screenplay, even though most others deemed it original. That leaves us with Justine Triet and Arthur Harari’s script for Anatomy of a Fall as the weak frontrunner, following its Golden Globe and BAFTA wins. But as the only one of these nominees who didn’t even get a nomination at the Critics Choice Awards, this is anybody’s guess.

Best Adapted Screenplay

I could make the case for any of these five. Barbie won plenty of accolades, including a Critics Choice Award, and might be underrated here since it competed in the original screenplay race at other awards shows. Oppenheimer is the best picture frontrunner, with enough coattails to win races up and down the board. Its fellow nominees for best director, Poor Things and Zone of Interest, clearly have a lot of support from the Academy. But the math likes American Fiction, thanks in part to its recent BAFTA and USC Scripter honors.

Best Animated Feature

For Hayao Miyazaki fans, it’s hard not to vote for The Boy and the Heron, purportedly his final film. And this particular Spider-Man franchise has already won this category five years ago, which could cut either way: Either it signals the Academy has a strong affinity for this Spider-Man rendition, or it portends some possible Spider-Man fatigue. The model prefers the winner of the Producers Guild, Visual Effects Society, and a host of critic circle honors, but this one is far from over.

Best Documentary Feature

Last year saw an incredibly close race that was narrowly won by the mathematical favorite, Navalny, a win that now takes on even greater meaning in light of recent events. This year’s Oscar race isn’t quite as close, but the broader subject of wrongdoing by Russia is the same. 20 Days in Mariupol is as important as it is tragic, and it is likely on the precipice of an Oscar.

Best International Feature

Greatly appreciated by those of us in the Oscar prediction business, the Academy has started making this one easy on us with some regularity. Roma, Parasite, Drive My Car, All Quiet on the Western Front, and now The Zone of Interest were each the lone best picture nominee in the best international feature category, and (if The Zone of Interest wins here) each the clear victor on the international side.

Best Production Design

Barbie and Poor Things – two films that built superlatively imaginative worlds not quite like anything we’d ever seen before on screen. BAFTA and Art Directors Guild voters opted for Poor Things. Critics Choice voters and plenty of the lesser-followed awards opted for Barbie. If you’re entering an Oscar pool, this might be one of those categories where the smart choice is whichever one you think is going to be less popular in your pool.

Best Cinematography

Hoyte van Hoytema shot a movie in black-and-white. He shot a movie in color. He shot a movie for Imax. He shot a movie for traditional theaters. It’s a biopic and a science film and a political drama and a war movie and a romance all wrapped up into one, and it’s the clear frontrunner for best cinematography.

Best Film Editing

Another category, another Oppenheimer prediction. The Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs, Eddies, and a host of others lined up behind Jennifer Lame’s editing work, and the math is doing the same. If every single one of these predictions is correct (an unlikely outcome), Oppenheimer will wind up as the fifth film with 8 or more wins on 13 or more nominations, after Gone with the Wind, From Here to Eternity, and Titanic.

Best Visual Effects

Godzilla Minus One is a really popular pick here, and it very well might win. What they managed to do on a modest budget was extremely impressive. But the math prefers The Creator. It won the Visual Effects Society’s top honor along with that of many other critic groups, while Godzilla missed out on nominations from both the VES and the BAFTAs.

Best Costume Design

It’s déjà vu from best production design. Not only do we have the exact same set of five nominees (only the third time these two categories have precisely lined up, after 1969 and 2003), but we also have the same top two. Once again, it’s Barbie vs. Poor Things, with a remarkably similar pattern of wins and losses this awards season. The math comes to the same verdict in favor of Barbie, but no film reaches 50 percent.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

This is probably the model’s boldest pick of the year. A whole lot of people are picking Maestro, including the betting markets. Those markets are a factor in my model, but not enough to drown out the BAFTA win and assorted other honors that Poor Things picked up. Further complicating matters is that a number of predictors went towards Barbie, which wasn’t even nominated here. With a separation of just 4 percent between the top two, this is one of those hold-your-breath categories.

Best Original Score

Ludwig Göransson wrote one powerhouse of a score for Oppenheimer, a sort of in-your-face masterpiece that matches the intensity of the film’s subject. He’s already won a Grammy for this work, and after sweeping through awards season, an Oscar sure looks likely to be next.

Best Original Song

For the first time since La La Land, the top two contenders for best original song both come from the same film. That year, there was some concern that La La Land supporters would split their vote and “How Far I’ll Go” or “Can’t Stop the Feeling” would triumph, but “City of Stars” still won comfortably. It’s the same story here: it’s certainly possible that Barbie supporters split their vote, but “What Was I Made For?” is the solid frontrunner.

Best Sound

This is the fourth year of a combined best sound category. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter all that much: In all four years, my model suggests that the same film would have won both sound editing and sound mixing, if they were still separated. This year, that double-winner would have been Oppenheimer, so it’s the clear leader in the combined version.

There isn’t enough data to predict the three short film categories mathematically, though betting markets currently favor The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar for Live-Action Short, Letter to a Pig for Animated Short, and The ABCs of Book Banning for Documentary Short.

Ben Zauzmer is a contributing writer for The Hollywood Reporter and the author of Oscarmetrics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood.