Questionable Odds

Nate Silver became justly famous for making the transition from sabermetrics to election predictioneering, but color me skeptical of this New York magazine article that includes his take on the upcoming Oscars. His statistical model, it says:

...involved building a huge database of the past 30 years of Oscar history. Categories included genre, MPAA classification, the release date, opening-weekend box office (adjusted for inflation), and whether the film won any other awards. We also looked at whether being nominated in one category predicts success in another. For example, is someone more likely to win Best Actress if her film has also been nominated for Best Picture? (Yes!) But the greatest predictor (80 percent of what you need to know) is other awards earned that year, particularly from peers (the Directors Guild Awards, for instance, reliably foretells Best Picture). Genre matters a lot (the Academy has an aversion to comedy); MPAA and release date don’t at all. A film’s average user rating on IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) is sometimes a predictor of success; box grosses rarely are.

So that's the six major Oscars (the four acting awards plus picture and director) with five nominees per category multiplied by 30 years multiplied by, what, 10 categories of data? 9,000 discrete pieces of information, total? That's not a huge database, that's a medium-sized Excel spreadsheet. Which may explain the improbable odds, e.g. that Slumdog Millionaire has a 99.0 percent chance of winning Best Picture while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has a 0.0 percent chance.  That's just goofy; anyone who's watched the Oscars faithfully through the years, and yes I admit to this personal shame, knows that the academy is more fickle and unpredictable than that. Anne Hathaway has a 0.0 percent chance of winning Best Actress? Because Oscar voters are famously averse to giving awards to beautiful young actresses? Taraji P. Henderson is four times likelier than Viola Davis to win Best Supporting Actress, because Benjamin Button was nominated (but has no chance of winning) and Doubt wasn't (event though it produced three other acting nominations)? I know journalists are averse to numbers but this is an article that desperately needs a few sentences explaining the concept of "standard error." 

Anyone who wants to give me 50-1 odds on Button and/or Hathaway, or 5-1 on Viola Davis, I can be reached at kevincarey1@gmail.com.  Don't worry, it's a sure bet, Nate Silver's predictive models are foolproof.