Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

The acad­emy awards is a bit of a pop­u­lar­ity con­test. Not as much as the Golden Globes, so it will prob­a­bly be a lit­tle more excit­ing to see if there’s any pre­dic­tive insight here.

I’m just going to stick with the big awards and pull a few charts and see if there’s any­thing real inter­est­ing to look at.

Let’s look at best actor. We have Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Mor­gan Free­man, and Jeremy Ren­ner bat­tling it out.

Analy­sis of the sub­ject “Oscar Actor” tells us that Jeff Bridges leads the pack in sen­ti­ment and vol­ume. Look­ing at buzz and trends, George Clooney is just way more pop­u­lar — I’m going write this off as the Clooney fac­tor. Colin Firth also has a won­der­ful sen­ti­ment score. But since I can’t ignore Jeff Bridges’ vol­ume and sen­ti­ment scores com­bined, I’m pick­ing Jeff Bridges.

Best actress is look­ing very San­dra Bul­lock: 92% pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment and 23% of the con­ver­sa­tion vs. just 14% for Meryl Streep – who would’ve thought a year ago.

The Best Direc­tor Oscar gets inter­est­ing. I think most peo­ple were pre­dict­ing James Cameron had an easy win. He has 19% of the con­ver­sa­tion but his ex wife, Kathryn Bigelow has 17%, well within a mar­gin of error in my down and dirty search.  And Cameron’s sen­ti­ment score of 89% pos­i­tive (never mind key­words like “evil”) is below Bigelow’s 94%. Now this is where it gets real squishy, analy­sis by sub­ject ref­er­ence is slightly bet­ter for Cameron but the sen­ti­ment of the posts for Bigelow is far bet­ter. Got that? That means peo­ple are say­ing nice things about Cameron more often but their arti­cles are more pos­i­tive about Bigelow when dis­cussing best direc­tor. What do the pure buzz num­bers telling us? Search­ing Cameron and Bigelow within Oscar, there’s just more talk about him. So if you think it’s a total pop­u­lar­ity con­test it’s Cameron and if you think it’s about a lit­tle bit more of an emo­tional deci­sion go with with Bigelow. I’m going with Bigelow.

Now for Best Pic­ture. I would have thought this cat­e­gory would clearly favor Avatar. It does not. It actu­ally looks a lot like the best direc­tor analy­sis – but closer. So I’m going to have to go against my instincts and go with Hurt Locker. This one is just so close.

What are the Vegas Odds? Are the gam­blers smarter?

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges by a big mar­gin 2/15

Best Actress: By a decent mar­gin it’s San­dra Bullock

Best Direc­tor: Kath­eryn Bigelow over James Cammeron

Best Pic­ture: Avatar 4/7 over Hurt Locker 6/5

I’m not pre­tend­ing to gain any seri­ous insights here, just hav­ing a lit­tle fun to see if how the blo­gos­phere feels about things and to see if it has any rel­e­vance to how the acad­emy votes.

Edi­tors note: Jimmy is not a pro­fes­sional ana­lyst. His wife, who is, will some­times remind him that what he thinks is a rel­e­vant devi­a­tion may not really be all that rel­e­vant at all. So don’t go bet­ting the cow on any­thing I have to say. I hope you enjoy the oscars.

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