It’s no doubt 2023 will take it’s place in moviemaking history as the “Barbenheimer Year” as Barbie and Oppenheimer were released in synchrony and earned more than $2 billion worldwide perhaps alleviating the well-documented post-pandemic struggles of the movie industry. This Sunday’s 96th Academy Awards may just put the final exclamation mark to that truthful meme from the red carpet interviews to the announcement of the Best Picture of 2023. Once again, we are happy to do our part and share our Machine Learning predictions which have become an annual BigML tradition.
The 2024 nominees are led by Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed biopic, Oppenheimer, with 13 nominations followed by 11 for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, 10 for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and 8 for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
The Data and Models
As we have done since 2018, our team has collected the relevant data points about this year’s nominees and generated a new set of Machine Learning models for each award category. This makes your job much easier should you decide to make your own ML-powered predictions. Simply clone the Movies 2000-2023 public dataset from the BigML gallery and use it in conjunction with the wide variety of modeling resources of the BigML platform. Don’t have a BigML account yet? You can easily create a free one here in less than a minute!
The latest version of our dataset covers 1,505 movies nominated for various awards from 2000 to 2023 with 312 features including:
- Film characteristics such as synopsis, duration, budget, and genre.
- Film critic and audience reception measures like ratings and box office performance.
- Nominations and winners for key industry awards such as Golden Globes, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, and Critics Choice.
As seen above, this year we decided to spice up our dataset with the addition of historical betting odds to test whether the betting lines from various online sites have any predictive power. This data is available only for major award categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Academy Awards betting likely pale in comparison to the much more popular and thus efficient sports betting alternatives so we let our OptiML models decide how relevant historical odds are. It turned out that for Director, Actor, Actress and Supporting Actor awards they are Top 10 in predictive power, whereas Best Picture and Supporting Actress models chose to fade the odds data. As in previous years, the data fields capturing the results of other movie industry awards that same year reign supreme — no surprises there.
As a reminder, OptiML (our popular AutoML feature) automatically finds the best-performing supervised models for you. When the individual OptiML model search executions finished for each award category, our engineering team built Fusions, by combining the top performing models from each OptiML search based on the phi-coefficient metric. This means different modeling techniques may partake in the final predictions, which in turn can make the resulting predictions more robust and arguably less noisy due to equal weight averaging. This year we chose to make use of the top 5 models (vs. last year’s top 20) to tighten the predictions a bit more while still avoiding potentially relying on an overfitted single model.
Once our Fusion models were created, we made Batch Predictions against the movies produced in the year 2023 that we had split aside into a separate dataset from our aforementioned main dataset.
As usual, given BigML’s emphasis on white-box models with full explainability, we can dig deeper into models and predictions for added introspection as needed. For example, you can navigate to any Fusion model’s partial dependence plot to see how various data fields interplay in determining whether a given movie or individual nominee will win the Oscar.
The 2024 Predictions
Without further ado, we move on to this years predictions with the most likely winner along with other nominees in the same category sorted by decreasing scores. Keep in mind that these scores are not supposed to add up to 100. The models are telling us how a movie/artist with a given set of characteristics will likely do in a given award category based on 20+ years of historical data on that particular award. That assessment is made independent of the other competing nominees for the same award this year. In other words, a high score can be interpreted as that nominee’s overall profile looking quite like the old winners of that category.
- Oppenheimer is the heavy favorite to win by what seems a country mile.
- This prediction usually goes hand-in-hand with the Best Picture, which means the brains behind Oppenheimer gets his Oscar statue if it goes as planned.
- Get ready to see real competition here. No one should be shocked if Lily Gladstone pulls it off but the models put Emma Stone half a step ahead.
- Cillian Murphy aka “Oppie” is expected to add to the Oppenheimer tally for the night.
- Our models like Da’vine Joy Randolph clearly more than her competition.
- More Oppenheimer, this time with Robert Downey Jr.
- The Holdovers is slated to get on stage and make it count in this category.
- Just when you think Oppenheimer is done for the night, here comes another one!
In addition to the popular awards above, two years ago we added 11 more categories that are more technical in nature. So far we have a pretty good track record with those so we continue predicting them for you. The verdict is four more Oppenheimer oscars bringing the total to a remarkable 9 Oscars!
- Best Cinematography: OPPENHEIMER
- Best Costume Design: BARBIE
- Best Film Editing: OPPENHEIMER
- Best Sound: THE ZONE OF INTEREST
- Best Visual Effects: THE CREATOR
- Best Makeup and Hairstyling: POOR THINGS (NOTE: OPPENHEIMER is a close 2nd.)
- Best Music, Original Song: BARBIE (NOTE: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is a close 2nd.)
- Best Music, Original Score: OPPENHEIMER
- Best Production Design: OPPENHEIMER
- Best International Feature Film: THE ZONE OF INTEREST (NOTE: SOCIETY OF THE SNOW is a close 2nd here, and IO CAPITANO a somewhat close 3rd.)
- Best Animated Feature Film: SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE
This concludes our 2024 Oscars predictions. Now it’s your turn to follow in our footsteps building your models as you get ready for Sunday’s festivities which has a promising lineup of prime time entertainment. As usual, we’ll follow up with a post early next week that grades our prediction. Till then, good luck to all the Oscars hopefuls!
