Silver Spells It Out
Three days ago the great political trends-and-numbers analyzer Nate Silver , the author-creator of FiveThirtyEight (now a N.Y. Times column) who was way, way in front of most of the political statistician crowd during the 2008 presidential election, began analyzing the Best Picture Oscar race for Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger column.
This was a day before the Oscar nominations, of course, but Silver’s view is basically that The Social Network will most likely win. The core of his reasoning is (a) that the Academy has been closely following the preferences of the BFCA/Critics Choice awards in recent years and…uuhhh, hold on…uhmm…oh, yeah…and that (b) the Academy’s instant-runoff voting system, “which is no more convoluted than, say, the voting process for Dancing With The Stars,” he says, favors David Fincher‘s film.
“Instant-runoff voting can make a difference when there is a choice between an ‘agreeable’ candidate and one that some people love,” Silver writes, “but other people can’t stand, perhaps tipping the balance toward the former choice. This may have been the situation last year, when we had a somewhat weaker field overall.
“The Social Network is much more than ‘agreeable’, though: yes, nearly everyone likes the movie, but also, some people think it’s absolutely epic . In our experiment, it got to both have its cake and eat it too, picking up a lot of first-place votes at the outset, but also serving as a failsafe for many voters once other films fell by the wayside. If its critical reviews are any guide, it needs to be considered the favorite to win Best Picture, and perhaps a prohibitive one.”
This just in from one of the Gurus of Gould (all of the members of this esteemed panel of Awards Season blognosticators are in some way related to either the late Harold Gould or the current Elliott Gould):
“I don’t know about Nate’s analysis. I think those 120,000 promotional dime bags of Grade A Missouri Meth sent out to SAG members for one of the other Best Pic noms could have a major impact on the race.
First of all, it will be a much faster race…”
One thing about his example — it is impossible for a movie to be nominated for Best Picture without at least one #1 vote in the nomination process. (And, in fact, most likely a few more than one.) So it’s unlikely that you’d be in a position where there’s a movie which is literally everybody’s #2 choice that nobody votes for for #1 because, if that’s the case, it wouldn’t get past the nomination stage [which is done in the same fashion as the final voting, as explained there].
Silver’s simulation was simplistic garbage.
Silver’s just getting started on this particular sort of thing, but give him time. I’m hoping he develops a statistics analysis model that will destroy all Oscar blogging forever. Go Nathan!
Silver used his fancy statistics 2 years ago to predict Taraji P Henson and Mickey Rourke would win Oscars…I can’t find any public record of his predictions for last year, but I assume he was so embarrassed by the prior year’s prognostication fail that he sat it out.
Until someone figures out how to scientifically poll Academy members, statistical mumbo jumbo of the sort he used in the Carpetbagger column is pretty useless.
Man, this dude needs to seriously chill. How about Le CROISSANT!!!
Nate needs to start writing about important stuff again — ie, baseball.
Silver’s getting better.
And Mickey Rourke should have won.
I’m convinced JR works for Harvey Weinstein. He’s always here spinning like a mad top against TSN and for TKS whenever any kind of Oscar news is reported. He’s always regurgitating talking points and campaign slogans.
He doesn’t seem to express opinions, he seems to spin for “his side.”
Glenn Kenny: The agents of the Contentioni are busy quelling a disturbance in Egypt, otherwise your full-frontal assault on their local agents, the Consensi, would have already spurred them into action and your internet access would already be shut down.
You still have time to recant before they are back in town for the Spirit Awards.
PS: Just received this missive from Mubarek:
“Chill out my H’wood peeps. There’s nothing for Jeff to worry about. Order is being restored. Spoke to my contacts at The Studio and the Publicists and let’s just say we’ve done a better job than Khomeini in taking care of the monarchy, if you know what I mean. And we know where Glenn Kenny lives. Also: Does Jeff have any more photos of Olivia Wilde?”
Critics hate the bloggers, so what else is new. The bloggers, of course, are the only ones who pay any attention whatsoever to the critics so it’s the height of irony that critics hate the Oscar bloggers. Let’s hope the Oscar bloggers start ignoring the critics. Maybe then they will earn their respect. Na, probably not even then.
But someone should tell Glenn Kenny that what Nate Silver is doing IS Oscar blogging. If the same article had been posted on an independent blog it would earn Kenny’s scorn.
dogcatcher:
And Jeff, and you among many others, spin for TSN over TKS, so who do you work for?
Jeez, TSN fans are searching for any statistic that will comfort them. TSN will probably win. And if it doesn’t, is it the end of the world?
“Silver’s simulation was simplistic garbage.”
Unless you actually read the article and realized that it wasn’t a simulation, just an explanation for how the votes get counted. But I’m sure you’re way too busy to read the actual article before you respond to it, you had to spend a lot of time thinking up such a brilliant retort.
(Comically, Jeff also missed the point that Nate was not predicting ‘Social Network’ based on that simulation.)
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