Simulated Oscar Ballot, Final Results!
Deepest thanks to Rob Y for another spectacular job compiling and analyzing the final results of our 3rd annual Simulated Oscar Ballot.
Running the numbers through the filter of an interesting what-if scenario, Rob notes that while Hugo takes third in the overall poll, if The Artist is completely removed from the list, Hugo wins. “Hugo and The Artist seem to share fans; when Hugo is eliminated The Artist surges.”
- Picture: The Artist
- Director: Terrence Malick, Tree of Life
- Actor: Jean Dujardin, The Artist
- Actress: Viola Davis, The Help
- S. Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners (landslide)
- S. Actress: Jessica Chastain, The Help (by only 6 votes)
- Original Screenplay: Midnight in Paris
- Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants and Moneyball (tie)
- Cinematography: Tree of Life (landslide)
- Editing: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(continued after the cut)
- Music: The Artist
- Song: Man or Muppet (landslide)
- Makeup: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Art Direction: Hugo (landslide)
- Costumes: Hugo
- Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
- Sound Mixing: Dragon Tattoo
- Sound Editing: Drive
- Foreign Language: A Separation (landslide)
- Live Action Short: The Shore
- Animated Short: La Luna
- Documentary Short: Tsunami
- Documentary: Pina
- Animated: Rango (landslide)
Full breakdown of the internal numbers with some interesting demographic divisions can be examined here:
Best Picture, final results
Final results in other categories
(I had begun to convert the major charts into jpgs to embed them with the results — then noticed Rob has already provided the entire collection in handy links to PDF pages. The clarity and flexibility of the PDF format exceeds whatever we might try to compress into column width — but if anyone has trouble accessing the data, let me know — I can still post some of the primary charts on site.)
41 Comments
Leave a Comment
Tracker Pages
Recently on AD
Follow Us!
Tags
Gallery
Fantastic job, guys! Thanks for doing this.
I always knew I should really be 20 years younger and living in Australia.
Who are these people that KNOW the academy?
1. I wonder how many people voted for Drive because they actually thought it had the best sound editing, and how many voted for it because they love it and could only vote for it in that category.
2. For the people who voted for A Separation for Best Foreign Language Film, how many other nominated films have you seen? I hadn’t seen any others so I recused myself from that category.
The lesson to take from all this is: AD readers should be the ones doing the real voting.
True,
When I chose the demographic of “Knowing the Academy” I wanted to somehow capture the Hollywood culture. Since the Academy Membership is global, I had to choose a description. It isn’t the best, but it kinda works.
Rob
Other than S. Actress (Spencer or McCarthy all the way) I would be SO happy if this is how the results are tomorrow night!
Why don’t the totals add up on the pdf? For instance, in the director tally, although The Artist allegedly has 230 votes, but if you add men + women, you get 226, and if you add the three age demographic groups together, you get 249. I could have guessed why the demos would add to less than the number (people choosing not to identify themselves), but how on earth could there be 19 more votes for Hazanavicius when broken down by age than there were when the simple total was tallied? (Don’t get me wrong, I love that you do these simulated awards. I’m just befuddled by the stats we’re getting.)
Thanks, Rob Y! Very cool.
It’s weird but the demographics showed that the voters here are about as male as the Academy.
Thanks for the clarification Rob! Amazing work! I work in Business Intelligence, so dealing with data is something off a passion for me too.
I would like to make a recommendation for next year…
Weighted Scoring Method
For each category, the user should be asked what they thought was best and how many of the nominees in that category had they seen. And then use that as a general indicator of the strength of the vote.
For instance, Best Sound
War Horse, 4/5 = 0.8
War Horse, 3/5 = 0.6
Hugo, 1/5 = 0.2
Hugo, 5/5 = 1
Result -
War Horse = 1.4
Hugo = 1.2
Could be a nice supplement.
OMG I hate you guys. *pinches bridge of nose*
Not Rob Y. Good work dude.
But all you THE ARTIST people who have infiltrated our Utopia of snark and good taste.
And you guys and your daddy issues (ToL). I guess it’s a good thing there wasn’t a penis movie in the running. XD It is interesting that it wins with the people who’ve seen all nine. I only missed EL&IC. My vote was for HUGO and I had THE ARTIST last.
James,
The reason why the totals do not add up is that some people do not participate in the demographics portion.
Rob
I was quite shocked, saddened and sickened that The Artist won here. It made me wonder if some people misunderstood and were trying to predict. *shrug* But then Chastain won for ToL and clearly that was not the case….though for the one surprise, REALLY? That award goes to either McCarthy or Spencer…not to Chastain’s 10 words in ToL. Anyone who needed to take a crap real bad could have turned in the same performance. The best performance in that movie was Brad Pitt’s mouth, which alternated between severe underbite and normal throughout. I guess he never decided on that element of his character.
@Mel It says right there that Chastain won for The Help, what are you talking about?
I added The Help after Chastain’s name. That’s my tampering and might be wrong. We’ll double-check to be sure I didn’t screw it up.
Thanks Rob – outstanding work.
Steve50 – very amusing. We have good primary taste in Australia. Secondary taste is a bit suspect though.
Absolutely brilliant, Rob Y! Incredible analysis/presentation of data!
Guess we all need to ease up on “The Artist” a little bit. Put a bunch of us in a room and get us to vote on the nominees and apparently it STILL wins!
Here’s hoping tomorrow night isn’t quite as predictable as we all think it’s gonna be!
Thank you – fantastic job, and very interesting. Very interesting to me that the results in 4 of the 6 major races mirror what we expect the Academy to do, ditto many of the technicals, and the screenplays.
That says at least two things to me:
1. Maybe the complaining about the Academy’s taste is out of line, given that it appears to line up almost exactly with the taste of broader people outside of the industry? If these results match the Academy’s tomorrow in say, 18/24, it will seem absolutely silly to blame “them,” when this is clearly what “we” want.
2. I wonder how much of the “everyone seems to think this is best, so I don’t want to disagre,” mentality is going on. It is still mytheory that a lot of what happens with the Oscars can be explained by the phenomenon of people not wanting to go out on a limb (even when the vote is secret!) and pick something else – it’s nicer, safer, easier, to fit in, to vote with the crowd, to do what is expected of you. These results prove that, to a large degree.
Meryl will win the OSCAR!!
Ahhh, I just assumed she won for ToL since it was the AD Awards. I can more easily understand at least if it was for The Help, but still….shocking.
Oh, and thank you to Rob Y! I realized all I did was bitch about the secret tastes of the AD readers and neglected to than Rob for all his hard work!
Mel,
You brought up an interesting point. If I look at those ballots that have Tree of Life as number 1, Jessica Chastain wins Supporting Actress for The Help with 43.5% of the vote.
Rob
I don’t recall the ballot. Were you only able to choose her for The Help? I wonder how many picked her for that, but really were voting for ToL? It was the same question some had about her Oscar nomination, wondering how many would vote for her technically for The Help, but meaning it for ToL or for the combination of both or all the others she was in (Take Shelter, Coriolanus, ect). She was just so prolific this year.
We used the Oscar nominations for the final ballot, so yes, on the ballot it said, “Jessica Chastain, The Help”
Duh. And I’ve even had my coffee today! Thanks, Ryan.
don’t feel bad, Mel — I’m in a daze too
when the question came up earlier, just the question itself was enough to make me lose my grip on the reality — and everything I knew for a fact evaporated.
Nice work against this year Rob, cheers.
Reinforces what I thought about the Viola/Meryl race as far as the American/European divide. The difference is striking. Viola beats Meryl by huge margins with US voters, but loses to Meryl amongst European voters. Meryl won the BAFTA in Europe, but Viola Davis won SAG in the US and will easily win the Oscar
^
that said, I think it’s a fair assumption that many voters took into account all of Chastain’s performances this year. It’s as if she got extra MVP credit for unnamed movies
#rationalization
She was seriously in so many of the most acclaimed films of the year. I was wondering how that happened out of nowhere. Was it being cast by Malick that put her in demand and on the radar? I’m thinking, yes.
@Ken
Meryl also wins handily with voters over 45 which most of the real academy voters are – advantage Streep.
Great job Rob! Truly masterful number crunching.
Rob, I really hate to belabor this, since you’ve done an immense amount of work and, like everyone else, I definitely commend and thank you for all that effort! It’s certainly more work than I would gladly volunteer for, myself. But if, as you said, some people didn’t fill out demographic data, then I shouldn’t be able to add the 25 & under, 26-45, and 46+ and get more than the total. I should get slightly less than the total, since the total reflects those 3 groups plus whoever didn’t indicate their age.
But to take Director as an example, The Artist’s total is 230 but it’s 249 when I add the 3 age groups. Hugo’s is 254, but 278 when the 3 age groups are combined. The Descendants (total 45) becomes 50. Midnight in Paris (58) becomes 62. And Tree of Life, where Malick wins with a “total” of 345 votes, gets 166 votes from the 25 & under, 157 from the 26-45, and 49 from the 46+, for a age group total of 372. I feel like maybe there’s an accidental double-count happening somewhere behind the scenes in the age demo data. A minor thing, sure! But one it would be nice to see cleaned up, if it’s simple.
James,
Thanks for catching that. There was an issue with the 46+ results. I reran the numbers and uploaded the revised PDF.
ALSO, there is a new column Seen All 9 Films. For some reason, Excel didn’t print that last column. It is now there.
Rob
Thanks for doing this! Awesome job and fascinating stat breakdown – even if most of my choices didn’t win (and won’t win on Sunday).
Thanks so much, Rob!
by the way, Adam Sandler just broke the record for most Razzie nods: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/awards/academy-awards/the-biggest-loser-adam-sandler-sets-record-for-razzie-nods/article2350130/
So The Artist wins everywhere. It’s currently #5 in my top 10, so I’m not complaining much. I picked Hugo and Scorsese but it’s absolutely fantastic that Malick wins here at AD and The Tree of Life coming in a close second. Thanks Rob.
Very nice:
Best Picture, awarded by Awards Daily & friends:
“The Artist”!
The numbers are interesting. Your sample size is rather small and your numbers favor a younger demographic. I’m not sure what your outcome really reflects.
it reflects Awards Daily’s readers’ choices from among this year’s nominees. what did you think it was supposed to reflect?
Brandz,
Yes, this poll is statistically biased, if we are trying to represent how the Academy is going to vote. But, it is about what the AD readers think is best of those films nominated. Nothing more than that. (And 900+ is not a small sample size.)
Rob
Ryan,
For the age demographic, I’d pay more attention to the >46, bearing in mind what you featured recently about the Academy voters profile. Which means I’d approximately have to make the >46 on a weighted basis of say 70-75%, versus the middle aged group like myself to be the minority quarter. Just to get a closer approximation of generational taste.
But of course other things are in play. Just figuring the generation divide.