Apologies for the 5-day delay, but this week I’ve been busy. Like real-world, adult busy! Like, 16-hour work week busy! But don’t worry, the title of this blog still applies to five out of seven days of the week.
Here is my Oscars follow-up. My target was 50% accuracy—if I couldn’t manage that, then this whole movie watching venture would’ve been a total waste of time, the only benefits being a greater exposure to cinematic culture and the enrichment of my mind or some stupid crap like that. But if I could manage 50%, it would be declared “not entirely a waste of time.” My stretch goal was 67%, a whopping 16 out of 24 correct.
Ultimately, I got 15, good for a first-place tie at my Oscar-viewing party (the co-champion had read my Oscar posts and considered them while making his selections, though; I’m not taking credit or anything, because he swept the Director-Actor-Actress-Picture home stretch like a baller, but it’s still further reassurance that I’m not a blithering idiot).
I correctly predicted Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Foreign Film, Original Song, Original Score, Documentary, Documentary Short, Makeup & Hairstyling, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, Animated Short, and Live Action Short.
Of those, I probably feel the best about the Documentary and Shorts categories (because I actually made informed decisions in some pretty notable but popularly overlooked categories, even though they were the popular picks). (Full disclosure: I had not seen, or known the premises of, the Documentary Shorts. I literally selected one at random. It was pure luck. I feel like a sham.) Oh, I’m also a little proud of Sound Editing and Mixing, because once I learned what those actually entailed, I made my own picks and fucking nailed them. Knowledge is power, y’all.
I incorrectly predicted Best Director, Supporting Actor, Animated Feature, Original and Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Production Design, and Film Editing.
I feel like I could have gotten Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay; the winners were nominees I felt fully deserved the Oscar, but didn’t actually think would win. I’m a little peeved about Production Design (Lincoln, though I guess it was all historically accurate blah blah blah), Cinematography (Life of Pi instead of Skyfall), and Animated Feature (Brave because it’s Pixar, basically). I don’t feel bad about Director and Film Editing, because I still have no fucking clue how to identify excellence in either of those.
Next time, I need to either go with my head or my heart; this year was a little of each, and my picks were a bit confused. Relatively successful, but confused nonetheless.
I say relatively successful. But that’s just because I won my Oscar-viewing pool against a bunch of know-nothing plebeians. How did I stack up against the real heavyweights, the professionals?
And by professionals, I mean just the Oscar prediction blogs I actually read before the big night: Film School Rejects and Anonymous were my biggest influences, then there was the Huffington Post and Grantland. I also looked at a few exploratory predictive measures, such as Rotten Tomatoes “fresh” percentage (from both critics and audience), a cat, a dog, and random selection.
The rankings:
1. Huffington Post (18/24) – 75%
2. Me (15/24) – 62.5%
3. Film School Rejects (10/18) – 55.6%
4. Anonymous (10/23) – 43.5%
5. Grantland’s Wesley Morris (10/24) – 41.7%
6. Oscar the Cat (4/10) – 40%
7. Rotten Tomatoes Audience (7/22) – 31.8%
8. Oscar the Dog (3/10) – 30%
9. Random Selection (6/24) – 25%
10. Rotten Tomatoes Critics (5/21) – 23.8%
To be fair, the only real comparisons are the HuffPo, Film School Rejects, and Wesley Morris—against whom I performed admirably, if I must say so myself (I must, because this is my blog and none of you fuckers ever leave me flattering comments). Anonymous wasn’t predicting the winners, he was voting for the winners based on his personal standards of merit. The Rotten Tomatoes scores just accounted for the top approval percentages overall and not the individual elements of a film; since Argo was the highest-rated movie overall, for example, it was predicted to win all of its nominated categories. Oscar the Cat and Oscar the Dog are a cat and dog, respectively.
This terrible pool makes me look like a big fish, but how do I stack up against the real heavyweights, the professionals?
And by professionals, this time I mean people who are actually paid to do this (i.e. literally professionals).
Slate produced an Oscars dartboard (as it is wont to do with electoral college predictions, lolgop) to see who was the wrong-est among 43 entertainment writers and critics. It only accounts for 11 categories (the Big Six plus the Screenplay awards, Best Documentary and Animated Feature, and Cinematography), for which I was 5-for-11 (45%). This distribution had a median of 64% and a mean of 60.3%.
If you take my overall stats, I look pretty good, sitting right between the mean and median. But these 11 categories include 6 of my 9 mis-selections, just about the worst sampling of categories I could hope for. For the other 13 categories, I picked a cool 76.9% (10-for-13). But instead, I’m relegated to the level of writers for Slate and Forbes, whatever those are. Ugh, right?
I also feel bad for the top picker, who was one Wreck-It Ralph win away from perfection… of 43 critics, 27 picked it to win, while only 11 picked Brave, 4 Frankenweenie, and 1 ParaNorman. Lame, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, pret-ty lame.
But anyway, there you are. Proof I’m not a failure of a film critic. And once I get better at predicting the categories that most people actually pay attention to, I’ll be unstoppable!
Muahaha and so on and so forth.
P.S. Another Mascot Madness PSA. Give me inventive ideas for predicting March Madness games based on the teams’ mascots. For example, I usually imagine a one-on-one fight on a regulation basketball court between a real life tiger and Spartan; last year, I switched things up and instead imagined a Republican primary race between a real life tiger and Spartan. I give alternatively silly and overly-logical reasons for my predictions and the outcomes, interlaced with tremendous wit and humor.
Some ideas I’m bouncing. Size-equalized mascots, so all contenders are the same size (then spiders and nuts and trees won’t be quite so laughable). Fights taking place not on a basketball court, but in the natural environment most associated with the host city (e.g. a swamp for New Orleans, city streets for NYC). COME UP WITH MORE FOR ME SO I DON’T HAVE TO THINK CREATIVELYYYY.
~ Sean
Nothing Everyday 