Our method will now look solely at the other awards that were given out in the run-up to the Oscars: the closest equivalent to pre-election polls. These have always been the best predictors of Oscar success. In fact, I have grown wary that methods that seek to account for a more complex array of factors are picking up on a lot of spurious correlations and identifying more noise than signal. If a film is the cinematic equivalent of Tim Pawlenty -- something that looks like a contender in the abstract, but which isn't picking up much support from actual voters -- we should be skeptical that it would suddenly turn things around. Just as our election forecasts assign more weight to certain polls, we do not treat all awards equally.

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