Awards Daily Oscar Ballot, deadline fast approaching: Wednesday, 10 p.m. PT

Hey gang, don’t forget that tomorrow night at 10 p.m. is the deadline to fill out your ballot in our 15th annual Awards Daily Oscar Project.

Last year our expert guest contributor Dave Guthman asked the question, “Who Has the Best Oscar Predictions?” Ben had scoured the internet over the past 18 years and examined over 4500 sets of Oscar predictions. He plugged all his findings into a database, making sure his sources were comparable, and was able to determine which kind of predictions are most likely to help awards-watchers win Oscar contests.

His conclusion? Informal online surveys and casual mainstream journalist observers have a dismal track record. The best individual predictors are hardcore stats geeks, and close behind are a category of Oscar aficionados that Ben calls Top Users.

Once again I’m proud to say that AwardsDaily’s own Oscar Squad charts ranked high in the top tier of Oscarwatcher prediction groups. (And the main reason that I ever get anything right is because I’m always lurking here in the comments and learning from the tips you readers continue to teach me.)

The trick to never forget is to try to remain as objective and dispassionate as possible. Following our hearts might be fine for romance but it’s a bad strategy (In fact, our hearts can lead to disastrous romance as well. Or is that just me?)

So it’s not surprising that among the best of all the various online predictors, with a consistent accuracy higher than 75% are betting odds sites.

As we’ve noted before, professional odds-makers are good at what they do. They have to be because there’s money involved. Cash rewards are a terrific incentive to be accurate.

According to many oddsmakers, The Power of the Dog is still predicted to take home the Best Picture award at this Oscars on Sunday, although my guess is that plenty of people are now betting against it.

What makes things interesting nowadays is that we can track how the Oscar odds change over a period of time. The biggest change, obviously, is when the nominations are released and when other award shows (like SAG) take place.

It’s hard to recall a year when the odds have shifted so dramatically.

A month ago, The Power of the Dog stood at -175 with the best odds to win the Best Picture category at this year’s Academy Awards. As of today, The Power of the Dog is at -140 and CODA stands at +110.

Falling somewhat outside the scope of these reliable Oscar indicators is the simulated ballot unique to AwardsDaily that we’ve done annually for 15 years now. Thanks to the meticulous number crunching done by AD’s own Dr. Rob, our simulated ballot is not so much an Oscar prediction system as it is a teaching tool to help illuminate our understanding of the preferential ballot process.

(And don’t forget we run a parallel Oscar Contest for the many smart friends and readers in our own community of experts to show off their prognostication skills.) The result of each year’s experiment represents a set of alternative Oscar winners.

The Awards Daily Oscar simulation isn’t meant to predict what the Academy will do. It’s to show what we would do if we each got our own Oscar ballot.  That’s the ballot deadline I’m writing to remind you about today.

In the chaos of yet another year when the extended awards calendar has tested our patience and frayed our nerves, the mood here has often felt like that famous description of soldiers at war: “Months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”5 days from now we’ll enter the “sheer terror” phase of this year’s festivities.

Buckle up, and make sure your rawhide ropes are safely braided.