Following our various simulators (which can be found here), we can use the high number of odds available on the upcoming 87th Academy Awards to give probabilities on various award winners.
We won't delve too deeply into how the values were derived, as this is explained in our articles on our Premiership Simulator and our General Election simulator.
We took odds from the major awards from five sites: bet365, skyBet, Ladbrokes, William Hill and Coral. However, for the minor awards odds from these sites were unavailable, so we used Paddy Power, 888sport, Unibet, 32Red and bwin where available.
Individual Award Winners
Firstly, we will go through category-by-category, and look at the probability of each nominee winning. The embedded Excel document below should allow you to pick a category, using the drop-down menu (in the white cell), bringing up the nominees.
We can also predict which films are likely to win the most awards. To do this we run 1000 simulations of the model, and look at the tallied results. For more details on this method, see our equivalent article for our World Cup Simulator.
We will look at the nine movies which are in the running for the most awards. These are American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Interstellar, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash.
Firstly, we will look at the average number of awards each film collected in our simulations:
Boyhood - 2.946
The Grand Budapest Hotel - 2.521
Birdman - 2.212
Whiplash - 1.586
The Theory of Everything - 1.286
Interstellar - 1.277
American Sniper - 1.018
The Imitation Game - 0.880
Foxcatcher - 0.269
The clear top three should be no major surprise, although the high place for Whiplash may come as a pleasant surprise for that film's fans. The few awards expected for the Imitation Game, which is nominated for 8 awards, is somewhat of a surprise, and it seems to be due to the movie not being favourite for any category except the competitive Best Adapted Screenplay.
We can also look at the breakdown for individual films. Using the embedded document below, you can select a film using the drop-down list to see how many times it picked up each number of awards.
With the results of the General Election a long way away, the Oscars will prove an ideal opportunity to see how effective our prediction method is when the ceremony happens on the 22nd of February.
There will soon be an interactive version of the simulator available to use in our Simulators section.
Sources
Oddschecker - used for its comprehensive listing of odds for bookmakers.