Worth its weight in gold: how to make a killing predicting the Oscars
The TV audience may be in decline, but a passionate community of amateurs has been monitoring every tremor of buzz long before the ceremony
Jason Turer has been an Oscars obsessive since he was a teenager. The first Academy Awards he watched was the controversial 1999 ceremony, when Shakespeare in Love took home the best picture gong over Saving Private Ryan; since 2001, he’s attempted to predict Oscar nominees and winners every year. For many Oscars fans, predictions often take the form of, say, an office sweep or game between friends; others might make a list in their notes app and check off correct predictions on the night.
But for the past 10 years, 36-year-old Turer has been predicting the Oscars competitively on the industry blog and fansite Gold Derby – an outlet for awards season fanatics to score points based on their predictions in a game that combines the frivolous glitz of the Oscars with the obsessive, stats-based fandom of fantasy football. He describes his experience of the site, where he counts as an “all-star user” because of his high success rate, as one of “friendly competition – we’re all having fun here,” before conceding: “One of my life goals is to correctly guess every single category one year.”
Oscars viewership may have plummeted in recent years – to around 18.75 million US viewers in 2021, down from 41.6 million in 2010 – but, online, awards season fan communities are thriving. On Gold Derby, users are ranked based on the accuracy of their predictions for the Oscars and bellwether awards such as the SAG awards, PGA awards and Baftas, and discuss awards campaigns on the site’s forums. Fans of the Oscars congregate on the Reddit forum r/Oscars, but those interested in following the yearlong marathon from a film’s premiere to its shot at gold meet on r/Oscarrace, a forum more interested in finely calculated predictions and the minutiae of awards season politics. As the Oscars have become a less mainstream concern, more and more fans have started treating awards season like a niche sports league.
Gold Derby was founded in 2000 as an outlet for awards season news and expert predictions from industry figures and journalists; in 2011, the site began allowing users to create their own predictions for various awards shows. Joyce Eng, a senior editor at Gold Derby, says the fans on the site “probably follow [awards season] even more so than some of the journalists and experts featured – they track social media buzz, guild awards, and a lot of them do better in predictions [than the experts].”
To a casual fan, awards season may seem hard to predict – how could someone in, say, Bournemouth, know how members of the Oscars’ hair and makeup branch 5,000 miles away might be feeling? – but, in truth, it has more in common with a sporting season or election cycle than meets the eye. Oscar buzz around a film begins early in the year, sometimes even before it’s released, and will often crystallise (or sour) over the next 12 months; around December, awards bodies start handing out trophies, which is when the season begins to ramp up, with earlier prizes like the PGA and SAG awards often providing insight into who will win at the Oscars themselves. Nate Jones, New York magazine’s awards season columnist, says that the predictable rhythm of the season makes it easy and appealing for a layperson to follow. “There’s a sense of steadily raising stakes, and [awards] getting more important, and then it all climaxes with Oscar night,” he says. “There’s a narrative arc to the season, which is very satisfying – and it gets you invested, because suddenly it’s not a one-night thing.”
It might seem counterintuitive for such large fan communities to become obsessed with the back-end of awards season – who is attending which parties, who hired which awards publicists, and so on – but Jones says that’s the whole point. “That’s part of the appeal – it’s not only that you can nerd out, but you can nerd out in a way that makes you feel like an insider,” he says. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing the whole picture and I know how the industry really works, not like all the rest of these jokers on Reddit.’”
The predictability of awards season is also why fan communities are thriving, but actual betting on the Oscars remains relatively unpopular. By the time betting opens on the ceremony, the race’s frontrunners are already solidified; bookmakers’ odds on Oppenheimer winning best picture this year, for example, currently sit extremely low at 1/33. Betting on the Oscars is legal in the UK, but fairly rare in the US, where only eight states allow award show betting. (One Reddit user claims to have won $60,000 on Oscars parlays in 2019, but such successes seem relatively rare.)
This year, more than 10,000 people made Oscar nomination predictions on Gold Derby, a number Eng says goes up every year. The site’s success, she says, speaks to the innate sense of competition within all of us; following the Oscars and making statistics-based guesses allows non-sports fans to feel the kind of investment sports fans do when trying to predict the run of a certain team or player. “A lot of Oscars fans are huge cineastes who like, love Scorsese or whoever, so they want them to do well, too – sometimes in a really intense [way],” says Eng.
Turer says that predicting the Oscars enhances his love of the awards, and gives him real stakes when watching the actual ceremony. “People who watch it with me every year know that I have my whole thing – I always print out [the] predictions, and I’m keeping track of like, ‘OK, I got this category wrong, but I’m still in the game’,” he says. “It absolutely makes it more fun – it becomes sort of interactive. Sometimes I kick myself – last year, the ones that I wanted to win ended up winning, and I should have gone with my gut.”
Jones sees the rise of fan prediction communities as a throwback to the heyday of the Oscars, when it was one of the most-watched live events in the world. “As the general culture is getting less and less interested [in the Oscars], these people are still carrying the flame,” he says. “Now, because only the diehards are left, we can talk among ourselves like crazy people.”