The academy awards is a bit of a popularity contest. Not as much as the Golden Globes, so it will probably be a little more exciting to see if there’s any predictive insight here.

I’m just going to stick with the big awards and pull a few charts and see if there’s anything real interesting to look at.

Let’s look at best actor. We have Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Morgan Freeman, and Jeremy Renner battling it out.

Analysis of the subject “Oscar Actor” tells us that Jeff Bridges leads the pack in sentiment and volume. Looking at buzz and trends, George Clooney is just way more popular – I’m going write this off as the Clooney factor. Colin Firth also has a wonderful sentiment score. But since I can’t ignore Jeff Bridges’ volume and sentiment scores combined, I’m picking Jeff Bridges.

Best actress is looking very Sandra Bullock: 92% positive sentiment and 23% of the conversation vs. just 14% for Meryl Streep – who would’ve thought a year ago.

The Best Director Oscar gets interesting. I think most people were predicting James Cameron had an easy win. He has 19% of the conversation but his ex wife, Kathryn Bigelow has 17%, well within a margin of error in my down and dirty search.  And Cameron’s sentiment score of 89% positive (never mind keywords like “evil”) is below Bigelow’s 94%. Now this is where it gets real squishy, analysis by subject reference is slightly better for Cameron but the sentiment of the posts for Bigelow is far better. Got that? That means people are saying nice things about Cameron more often but their articles are more positive about Bigelow when discussing best director. What do the pure buzz numbers telling us? Searching Cameron and Bigelow within Oscar, there’s just more talk about him. So if you think it’s a total popularity contest it’s Cameron and if you think it’s about a little bit more of an emotional decision go with with Bigelow. I’m going with Bigelow.

Now for Best Picture. I would have thought this category would clearly favor Avatar. It does not. It actually looks a lot like the best director analysis – but closer. So I’m going to have to go against my instincts and go with Hurt Locker. This one is just so close.

What are the Vegas Odds? Are the gamblers smarter?

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges by a big margin 2/15

Best Actress: By a decent margin it’s Sandra Bullock

Best Director: Katheryn Bigelow over James Cammeron

Best Picture: Avatar 4/7 over Hurt Locker 6/5

I’m not pretending to gain any serious insights here, just having a little fun to see if how the blogosphere feels about things and to see if it has any relevance to how the academy votes.

Editors note: Jimmy is not a professional analyst. His wife, who is, will sometimes remind him that what he thinks is a relevant deviation may not really be all that relevant at all. So don’t go betting the cow on anything I have to say. I hope you enjoy the oscars.

Posted on: March 5, 2010, by : Jimmy Gilmore