Oscar Predictions: Roma Slight Favorite for Best Picture
February 24, 2019
Voting has finished in our annual Predict the Academy Awards contest, and we can reveal who you, our readers, expect to win at the Oscars tonight. Roma tops the polls, both in the number of Oscars it’s expected to win, and as the favorite for Best Picture, but its win is far from a sure thing. It gets 67% of the vote for Best Picture, well ahead of any other film, but not enough for us to call the race at this point. Green Book is the second-favorite for Best Picture, with about 15% of the vote, and Black Panther third with 6%. Bohemian Rhapsody is favored by 5% of voters, and the list is rounded out with the true longshots: A Star is Born, The Favourite, BlacKkKlansman, and Vice, in that order, with those last four all getting less than 3% of the votes.
There’s an argument to be made for pretty much all of the Best Picture nominees this year, which explains why Roma isn’t completely dominant, and it shouldn’t come as huge surprise if it doesn’t pick up the big prize. However, it would be very surprising if it didn’t get a major award. Alfonso Cuarón has 84% of the vote for Best Director, and the film has a 93% score for Best Foreign Language Film (although I think Cold War has a shot at pulling off a surprise win in that category). In the technical categories, Cuarón is favored to win Best Cinematography by 87% of voters. All that adds up to the film potentially winning 4 Oscars tonight, the best for any film.
Bohemian Rhapsody (with wins for Rami Malek, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing) and The Favourite (Original Screenplay, Costume Design, Production Design) are both predicted to win three Oscars, although they could both score quite a bit higher or lower than that. The Sound Editing award is virtually a three-way tie between Bohemian Rhapsody, First Man, and A Quiet Place. If Rhapsody doesn’t win in that category though, John Ottman is a pretty good bet for the Film Editing award, since he pulled the film back together after the loss of its director. Vice is very slightly favored in that cateogory, however. For The Favourite, Costume Design seems like a potentially tough category, with Black Panther having a strong claim to that title. Olivia Colman is a good longshot bet for Best Actress. Both films have a path to outscoring Roma in total Oscars won.
The acting awards all have very strong favorites. Glenn Close scores 84% of the votes for Best Actress; Rami Malek and Mahershala Ali both score 83% for Best Actor and Supporting Actore respectively. Regina King is technically the least certain winner, but she still gets 82% of the vote for Best Supporting Actress. Amy Adams joins Olivia Colman as the other dark horse in the acting races, not so much for her performance in Vice as for being long overdue a win.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 3D is the one film looking like a virtual lock to win. It scores 92% in the Animated Feature category, miles ahead of the competition.
The writing awards both have clear favorites. As already noted, The Favourite has a clear lead for Original Screenplay, but look out for a win for Green Book or Roma in that category. If either of those films win the screenplay award, their chances in the Best Picture category leap up. For the Adapted Screenplay award, BlacKkKlansman looks like a very good bet. It doesn’t look likely to win Best Picture or Best Director, and this seems like a way for Academy voters to give Spike Lee his first Oscar, at long last.
Overall, it looks as though the awards will be spread among quite a large list of films this year. In addition to the winners listed above, If Beale Street Could Talk is favored for 2 wins (Original Score, in addition to Supporting Actress), as is Vice (Film Editing, and Make-up and Hairstyling). First Man is very narrowly favored for Sound Editing. Avengers: Infinity War has big lead in the Visual Effects category. Last but not least, A Star is Born, which started Awards Season as the favorite in many categories but has failed to pick up much so far, does have the distinction of being the biggest favorite of the night in a single category: expect Lady Gaga to bring down the house with her performance of Shallow, then come back to the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Song.
- Predicted winners in each category
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
- Total votes in each category
- Predicted and actual winners in each category
Filed under: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Olivia Colman, Alfonso Cuarón, Regina King, Spike Lee, Rami Malek, John Ottman, Mahershala Ali, Lady Gaga