Google Trending Predicts The Social Network for the Win

I’ve been at this so long I remember when the Wall Street Journal used to do a poll to predict who would win — I think they turned out to be kind of right but not 100%. ¬†The reason the race is so hard to predict is because it’s won not on quality usually but on perception. ¬†And perception can change on a dime. ¬†We all remember high school, right? ¬†Sure, it was easy enough to predict who would win Homecoming Queen and King but one tiny blow-job-in-the-bathroom scandal and all hopes and dreams could be dashed. ¬†Perception, she’s a bitch.

Nonetheless, hope is a dangerous thing — and so it’s to hope that we cling — those of you who are hoping The King’s Speech wins — I don’t think you have anything to worry about – after all, this year is different for many reasons:

Can data trends generated by Google Inc.’s search engine tell us whether The Social Network will take home the Academy Award for Best Picture, or whether Colin Firth’s witty British charms will lead him to a victory in the Best Actor category for his role inThe King’s Speech?

Quite possibly.

Over the past three years, the film that wound up taking home the golden statute for Best Picture saw an upward trend in search volume for at least four weeks heading into the Oscars ceremony, as well as highest regional interest from New York, according to the Web giant’s new Google Oscar Search Trends site, which uses data collected by the company’s Insights for Search technology.

Each of the past three Best Picture winners — The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaireand No Country for Old Men – saw an increase in Web queries in the weeks leading up to the awards show and saw the highest regional interest from New York.

In fact, the last time a film walked off with the Best Picture Oscar while showing highest regional interest — a measure which determines which area is seeing the highest interest in a given search term relative to the total number of searches in that area — from somewhere other than New York, was in 2007, when Martin Scorsese’s classic The Departed took home the top prize.

That year, the highest regional interest for The Departed was in Massachusetts, which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, considering the film is set in Boston.

If the pattern holds true this year, The Social Network — the unauthorized biopic of Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher — is poised to take home the Oscar for Best Picture. Searches related to The Social Network have been trending upwards for five weeks.

Okay, I’ll take it. ¬†And in my pretend Oscars it walks away with Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing, Score, Sound. ¬†Cut to: “And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to …. The King’s Speech.”