Tuck Professor Uses Statistical Formula to Predict the Academy Award for Best Picture
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—February 25, 2005
CONTACT: Kim Keating-603-646-2733
HANOVER, N.H.—On Sunday evening, hundreds of millions of film fans around the world will tune into the 77th annual Academy Awards, trying to stay awake for the evening's last-yet most coveted-award for best picture. But Professor Andrew Bernard says he already knows which movie will take home the golden Oscar even though he hasn't seen any of the nominated films.
Bernard, professor of international economics at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, used a combination of history and statistics to forecast who will receive the highest honor in filmmaking. Bernard agrees with movie critics who say it's a toss-up between Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, but according to his model, the Howard Hughes biopic Aviator is the heavy favorite, with an 84.6 percent chance of winning.
Bernard's formula relies on three variables: a film's total Oscar nominations, number of Golden Globes won, and whether or not it's a comedy. The resulting estimating equation is:
Pr(Winning) = α• Nominations + β • Golden Globes + Θ • Comedy + εit
Using the formula with this year's other nominees for best picture, Sideways has a 0 percent probability of winning, Finding Neverland has a 0.5 percent likelihood, and Ray has a 1.4 percent chance of winning.
For each movie, the model gives an overall probability of being a winner across 20 years of best picture winners. To turn this into a prediction for each year, Bernard examined the probability of winning for each of the five nominations in every year dating back to 1984. The framework, using only three variables, accurately predicts 18 of 20 Oscar winners.
Looking back at past winners, Bernard also identified three types of movies in the best picture competition: Sure Things are films that would have won in almost any year; Lucky Dogs are movies that won by virtue of weak competition, and Doomed Gems are movies that would have won in almost any other year but had the misfortune to compete against a Sure Thing.
Bernard finds that The Aviator ranks well this year and will make it onto the list as either a Sure Thing or a Doomed Gem, depending on the voting. If any other movie wins in 2004, it would certainly have to qualify as a Lucky Dog.
To view the data and Bernard's comparison tables of best picture winners and losers over the years, please download the full report in Adobe Acrobat PDF format:
Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide. Information about the Tuck School is available at www.tuck.dartmouth.edu.
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