At last, we have arrived at that holiest of High Holy Days: the actual day of the Oscars. I’m so excited, I don’t have the words. Just imagine me flapping my hands wildly and making a noise a lot like “squee.” For six or more hours.

And, as promised, I have my Actual Oscars Picks. There’s still time to lock in your bets at your local sportsbook or oddsmaker. I have arranged my picks in a confidence list, according to Jeff Bayer’s yearly Oscar Bowling game. This is the fourth year I’ve played, because I’m obsessed.  My scores for previous years go like this:

2011: 232
2012: 224
2013: 249

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Today, on Oscar Night Eve, we’ll stop talking about what I think is going to win and talk about what some oddsmakers think is going to win. 

So first, a brief overview of how betting works. The number on the right is how many you have to bet to get the number on the left. The ratio of those numbers indicates how likely the oddsmaker thinks that thing is to happen: if something is 100/1, you only have to bet $1 and if it comes true, you get $100 back. But that means it’s not very likely to happen, because if it were going to happen every day, the oddsmaker would lose $99 every day, and that isn’t going to make them any money. Odds are set so that people are equally likely to bet both sides. That’s how sportsbooks make money: they set the line (odds, etc) at exactly the point where people will be willing to bet both sides of it; only one side will be right and the sportsbook keeps the money from the losers.

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Wrapping up the individual category breakdown, this is the last batch of movies that seem the most up in the air. For the other categories, click the “Oscars” tag on this post to see all posts on the topic (both this week and all time).

Documentary: Guys, this is hard. I mean, not just hard to predict who might win, but hard to even write about because The Act of Killing was my number one film of last year, and it looks like it might be upstaged by my #6 film of the year, 20 Feet from Stardom. And that’s not to mention the third major contender, The Square, which has had a last-minute surge (as more people have had a chance to see it) and which reverberates strongly with the events in Kiev and other revolutions in the two years since the one in the film.

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Today, we break down the next level of random categories that I’m a little less sure of than yesterday’s batch, about which in turn I was less sure of than Tuesday’s. I’m saving Best Picture for tomorrow, though, so you still have something to read for.

Foreign Film: I’ve only seen two of these nominees, but they were both really good, which beats the average from last year (Kon-Tiki, I’m looking at you).

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Today we move into categories that are more up for grabs than yesterday’s locks. As it happens, today involves a lot of bitterness. I’m a happy member of the camp that espouses “It’s only a snub if you can say what should have gotten left out,” but I don’t even care what you would have to leave out to include two of today’s nominees. 

Sound Mixing and Sound Editing: Some day, it will come time to learn once and for all in some kind of lasting way what the difference between these categories is. Today is not that day, as these are two categories that have no answer to “Why shouldn’t Gravity sweep all the technical awards?” Continue reading →

We made it! After an estimated 37,000 hours of Oscar chatter in the last few months, we are down to the Week Before the Ceremony, when everyone gets really serious and determinedly sets their predictions, which will be wrong.

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