At last, relief from the tortuous uncertainty of Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards. Now there is a surprisingly accurate way of predicting who will win.
Various attempts have been made to predict the Oscars, such as web-based games where people “buy shares” in actors. Instead, Iain Pardoe of the University of Oregon in Eugene and Dean Simonton of the University of California, Davis, took a purely statistical approach. They analysed the histories of around 1600 Oscar nominees between 1928 and 2006 in the four major categories: best picture, director, leading actor and leading actress. Then the pair teased out several…
