Best Picture 2016: Which Stat is Going Down?

This is the first time since I’ve been covering the Oscar race that no film has checked all of the boxes a film normally needs to in order to win Best Picture. Some say that stats don’t matter, that it’s all “confirmation bias” — finding proof for your theory. Some say stats do matter because they indicate history, or patterns that can be reliable or not. One of these films has to win so one of the stats will be thrown out or at least deemed fallible, not airtight. The question is, which one?

First, the stats themselves.

1. SAG Awards ensemble. We know that since the beginning of the SAG Awards ensemble vote, no film has ever won Best Picture without that nomination except 1995’s Braveheart, the very first year of the ensemble award. It’s the anomaly year that gets dragged out when a presumed frontrunner misses out. Two itportant things to note about them: SAG recently merged (2012) with AFTRA for these awards. That means it’s theoretically possible our sample has become altered a bit.  That means a guy who does television or even radio commercials out in Des Moines can be choosing the acting nominees if he gets selected to be on the nominations committee.  Does it make a difference? The SAG nominations were a bit “off” this year. But even in years when they’ve been “off” the stat mostly holds true. 25 YEARS
2. Golden Globe for Director. You have to go back to 2005 to find a year when the Best Picture winner was not Globe nominated. That’s 10 years. Before the Crash anomaly we have to go all the way back to our second most often dragged out anomaly — Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 which, for some reason, was never nominated for Director, not at the Globes, not at the DGA and not at the Oscars.  10 YEARS

3. The ACE Eddie — you have to drag back out the Driving Miss Daisy stat to find a year when a Best Picture frontrunner did not earn an Eddie nod first. 26 YEARS

Next week, we can suss out the wreckage from the DGA nominations to see if any of the films are missing there, but at this point, each of the films that seem as it they could win are missing SOMETHING.

Not all stats are created equal, though. The Golden Globe voters are 90 people. The ACE Editing voters total roughly 6,000 and the SAG-AFTRA nom com is around 2,000.

Stepping outside the big guilds for the moment, what are the other patterns we often see in the race that may or may not be considered stats?

1) Being released by October at the latest. The Big Short was screening before its premiere on November 12 at the AFI Fest. That is pushing it, date wise, but does it count or doesn’t it?

2) No film has ever won Best Picture after winning with the National Society of Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics without winning Best Director too. That stat is a long one, a strange one, and Spotlight could break it this year.

Lessons from Birdman

Last year, the pundits were too confident in their prediction that Boyhood would win or, more importantly, that Birdman could not win. What was the reason for that? Are we so afraid of ridicule that we tend to align behind one idea so as not to be humiliated if we’re wrong? Or did we genuinely have no clue that the guilds would so unanimously go for Birdman over Boyhood? It should be on the minds of anyone who calls this race: how could we have been that off last year from the general pre-guild consensus?

Last year’s stats had Boyhood, Birdman and The Imitation Game all in the SAG ensemble, ACE Editors, and PGA. Imitation Game didn’t have a Golden Globe nomination for director. That is the only weakness among the three of them.

If we throw out the stats altogether this year we have  a wide open race where any film can win. If we throw out the stats, The Martian could win. Straight Outta Compton could win. If we hold to the stats, The Big Short has the least dings against it at the moment.  The reason I’m writing it down here and repeating myself is to test the stats against this unpredictable season and measure which one gets tossed and why.

Update: just to head you off at the pass if you want to start throwing “meaningless” stats at me, like Birdman winning without an editing nomination and Argo winning without a director nomination – those matter less than when the bigger guilds omit something because it’s a numbers thing. 300 or 400 editing members of the Academy aren’t going to stop Birdman. Nor will 400 or so directors who leave off Ben Affleck, not when the momentum swung his way. And that’s the thing to remember most about stats: they don’t mean anything if the momentum is swinging your way. The reason I’m looking at them now is to help gauge where that momentum is headed.