The quest to predict this year’s Oscar winners with the same mathematical precision that
fivethirtyeight blogger Nate Silver called the 2012 presidential election has got a new contestant. The filmmaking website
The Credits has
teamed up with the social analytics and monitoring company Brandwatch,
to create a predictive data visualization that it has dubbed “
Social Oscars.”
East Coast Editor Bryan Abrams says the algorithm, which was created
by British quant Edward Crook, predicts the Oscar front-runners by
focusing on the positive mentions that nominated films, directors and
actors generate via critics and social media such as Facebook and
Twitter.
Abrams explains that the algorithm is created to filter out mentions
that are negative or that don’t specifically pertain to a nominated film
or an actor’s performance in it. “If there’s a positive story about
Best Supporting Actress nominee
Anne Hathaway having lunch at The Ivy, that’s not going to be counted,” he says.
The editor also estimates that, by the time the Academy Awards are
handed out on Feb. 24, the algorithm will have evaluated more than a
million mentions that it has evaluated on the Internet.
Read more
