Results tagged “Oscars”

It’s too long. We’re miffed by the nominations, and sometimes the process itself. The production numbers are cheesy and interminable. We’re displeased with the final results more often than not. Years later, we’re typically embarrassed by the outcome.

So let’s scrap the Oscars.

Even this year, when a reasonable and strong case can be made that the Best Picture winner was indeed the year’s best picture, all I heard were complaints. The ceremony was dull, and No Country for Old Men and Day-Lewis and Bardem were nearly inevitable.

So let’s replace this evil with another: We’ll choose the best movie of the year through something similar to the presidential-selection process.

Between the initial calculations and now, my Box Office Power Rankings-derived formula has not changed its Oscar conclusion: No Country for Old Men is still your Best Picture winner on Sunday.

The only movement involved the improved fortunes of There Will Be Blood and Atonement at the expense of Michael Clayton. The final standings: No Country for Old Men (15.0 points); Juno (14.3 points); There Will Be Blood (13.3 points); Atonement (10.7 points); and Michael Clayton (6.7 points).

The order feels intuitively correct, and the only thing that would surprise me (and rebuke my methodology) would be a Best Picture win by Atonement or Michael Clayton.

That said, I will defy my own carefully considered formula and predict a Juno win. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are too similar in tone, and both are too open.

You can make your own prediction at this Culture Snob poll.

... No Country for Old Men.

A few months ago, I promised that I’d try to use the basic Box Office Power Rankings formula to predict a Best Picture winner. The hypothesis is that Best Picture winners tend to have a blend of prestige and popularity, and that a quantitative measure of those qualities might have predictive value.

The weekly rankings use two measures of critical opinion (Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic) and two measures of box-office performance (revenue and per-theater average) to present a more accurate picture of movies’ receptions.

For the first Oscar edition — I’ll update the numbers as we get closer to the February 24 ceremony — I still used Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, but I did three box-office measures: total domestic box office, box office per week of release, and box office per week per theater. Then, I assigned points (one through five, with five being best) based on each nominated movie’s performance with each criterion. And then, to give equal weight to critical opinion and box-office performance, I multiplied the box-office points by two-thirds. I know you don’t care about any of this shit, but I’m trying to show my work.

Anyway, here’s how the Best Picture nominees shake out: No Country for Old Men (15.0 points); Juno (14.3 points); There Will Be Blood (12.7 points); Atonement (10.0 points); and Michael Clayton (9.0 points).

The hand-wringing going on right now about the state of Hollywood and the Oscars is a bizarre mix of long-overdue self-awareness and stubborn self-delusion. Observers have noted with much shock that people aren’t going to movies that much and that none of the Oscar nominees is a genuinely popular movie. But these are long-standing trends.

What the hell is happening with the delayed polarization that Crash has engendered? Nobody got terribly worked up about Paul Haggis’ sincere, overstuffed race-relations drama when it was released in April. But as the buzz started building that Crash might (gasp!) win the Best Picture Oscar, indignation showed its ugly face.