Why Has the Best Picture Race Become So Unpredictable?

“This is not a joke, Moonlight has won Best Picture.”

In 2017, when the Academy famously mixed up the envelopes for its biggest prize, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz had to repeatedly reassure everyone—probably even himself—that yes, this was really happening. It was not a joke; Moonlight had won Best Picture.

This was an unbelievable development—but not just because of the card snafu. Moonlight was already a long shot; for it to win at all was shocking. La La Land came into the 2017 Academy Awards as a juggernaut, having won most of the big guild awards in the run-up to the ceremony. With minus-450 betting odds to win the Best Picture trophy, it had an implied win probability north of 80 percent, making it a massive favorite. Moonlight, meanwhile, carried plus-430 odds, for a win probability under 20 percent.

The Moonlight win was astounding for other reasons: It was the first Best Picture winner to feature an LGBTQ main character. It was the first winner with an all-black cast. It was the first winner to prominently feature black people but not be about racism. And it was one of the lowest-grossing winners ever. All together, Moonlight’s win is arguably the biggest upset in Oscars history.

The next year, in 2018, another upset happened: The Shape of Water won as a narrow underdog to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And the next year, again: Green Book beat Roma, the presumptive winner. And the year before Moonlight there was another upset, when Spotlight shocked The Revenant, a strong favorite.

The above table shows the past 10 Best Picture favorites and winners. In the six years prior to 2016, the Best Picture favorite took home the trophy (per the odds from Sports Odds Checker). Then, chaos: four straight upsets. After years of chalk, the Academy’s Best Picture award is as predictable as Iowa’s caucuses. What is happening that is making the film world’s most prestigious honor so difficult to predict?

One explanation could be the move to an expanded field of Best Picture nominees and a preferential ballot before the Oscars in 2010 (for the 2009 year in movies). Instead of nominating five films and picking the one with the most votes, the Academy nominates up to 10 films for Best Picture. They then use a form of instant-runoff voting where the film with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those votes get redistributed to whichever film its voters ranked second. Repeat the process until one film crosses the 50-percent threshold, and the Academy has its newest Best Picture.

Many say this process rewards the “least disliked” or “most liked” film—one with broad consensus, but not necessarily a ton of big fans. That may be why the Best Picture and Best Director trophies have diverged so frequently in recent years. In 2013, Argo won Best Picture without director Ben Affleck having even been nominated for the Director award, and the two had different winners for 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019. Those two awards have split only 26 times in 91 years, yet five of those splits have come in the past seven contests.

But can the preferential ballot explain the upsets? The new voting system was established for the 2010 awards, and the Best Picture award didn’t go off the rails until 2016. If that change in voting procedure had a significant impact on the results, it didn’t become clear until six contests had gone by.

Maybe the voters themselves, not the voting method, are having the biggest impact. Following the #OscarsSoWhite narrative at the 2016 ceremony, when all 20 acting nominations went to white actors, the Academy worked to remake its membership. Since then, Academy membership has grown by 35 percent, with a focus on people of color and women. It would be no surprise if that leap in membership had a big impact on voting—something many thought when Moonlight won.

However, despite its efforts, the Academy is still 84 percent white and 68 percent male and has an average age in the late 50s or early 60s, according to a Hollywood Reporter analysis. As April Reign, the diversity advocate who created the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, told THR: “This still boils down to a popularity contest among older white men in the film industry.”

The answer may involve a combination of factors—but we’ll never know for sure, since the Academy doesn’t release any voting data. One thing is for certain, though: After four straight upsets, no Best Picture front-runner should feel safe.

This year, 1917 is the favorite. It has mopped up some of the most illustrious hardware this awards season, winning Best Picture (or the rough equivalent) with the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, the BAFTA, and the Golden Globes—and the film is poised to sweep most of the Academy’s technical categories. As a result, it comes into Sunday with minus-275 odds (per Bovada), which implies a win probability north of 70 percent.

But it hasn’t won everything. Parasite is in second in betting odds (plus-300, for a win probability of 25 percent), with wins at the Writers Guild Award (for Original Screenplay) and the Screen Actors Guild (for Ensemble) boosting its candidacy. It’s a critical darling that was generating plenty of Best Picture hype earlier in the year.

And Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (plus-800, 11 percent) can’t be counted out. It won the Critics’ Choice Award and the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. Hollywood has 10 total nominations, tied with 1917 and The Irishman for second most (Joker has 11). Brad Pitt is a heavy favorite for Best Supporting Actor, and Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated for Best Actor. It also could battle Parasite in the Original Screenplay category—Hollywood wasn’t nominated for the WGA award because Quentin Tarantino is not a guild member (thanks to a decades-old feud over his writing credit for 1994’s Natural Born Killers). If Hollywood had competed at the WGAs it may have won, which would have made the film a strong contender for Best Picture.

Having trouble following all that? Here’s your cheat sheet for how the major awards all played out this year:

But which of these awards matter most when it comes to predicting Best Picture? They certainly aren’t created equal—here’s how the various major awards have done in correlating with Best Picture in the preferential balloting era, with the Oscar-winning films in green:

In the past 10 contests, the PGA has been the best predictor, picking eight out of 11 (counting that tie in 2013) of the winners—73 percent. This makes sense. The PGA is the only major award to use a preferential ballot similar to the one the Academy uses, and the guild has around the same number of members as the Academy (roughly 8,000, though only a small fraction overlap in membership). Meanwhile, the DGA award has gone 6-for-10, tied with the Critics’ Choice trophy—but it’s also an award for Best Directing, not Picture, and it’s been great at predicting the Academy’s Director award (9-for-10, with the only miss being Argo, which wasn’t nominated at the Oscars). That 1917 has both is a good sign, and the BAFTA (5-for-10) is the cherry on top—even if the Brits have been wrong five years in a row.

Parasite’s wins, by contrast, are much less impressive. The SAG award has hit only four times, and the WGA is all over the place. But those two together could mean something: The last film that won both was Spotlight, and it won Best Picture. SAG has also correctly predicted some historical upsets, including Crash in 2006 and Shakespeare in Love in 1999. Actors make up the largest branch of the Academy by far, and writers are another sizable chunk. If Parasite has overwhelming support from those two constituencies, it could take the trophy. But that’s a big if—Parasite has no individual acting nominations, and a foreign-language film has never won Best Picture.

Meanwhile, Hollywood’s Golden Globe triumph means little—only two of the past 10 Musical or Comedy winners have claimed the top Oscar—but its Critics’ Choice award puts it in the running. That award has gone to the Best Picture six times out of 10, tying it for second with the DGA. How it would have done at the WGAs is the big mystery there.

And still, there are other factors to consider. The first is 1917’s lack of a nomination for film editing. In the past 40 years, 39 Best Picture winners have had a nomination in that category. However, this flaw may be the least worrisome of 1917’s concerns, as the one movie that won without an editing nomination was Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which shares a one-shot visual style with 1917. Sam Mendes’s technical masterpiece was never positioned to receive an editing nomination in the first place.

1917 is also not nominated for any acting categories. It wasn’t nominated at the SAG awards, either. If it were to win Best Picture, it would be the first film to do so without an acting nomination since Slumdog Millionaire in 2009. And since actors make up the largest chunk of the Academy, that’s a massive hurdle to overcome.

Additionally, 1917 was late to the scene. It would become the first Christmas release to win Best Picture since Slumdog Millionaire, and this year the Oscars were moved up in the calendar from their usual late-February date. But which way does that cut? Does the reduced runway mean voters will not coalesce around 1917, or that they haven’t had enough time to get sick of it? Fatigue seemed to be a factor in La La Land’s loss three years ago.

Parasite also won Cannes’s Palme d’Or award. While that accolade isn’t typically very predictive of Best Picture, it does highlight another flaw in 1917’s Best Picture candidacy: It did not premiere at a major film festival. Since The Departed won in 2007, every single Best Picture winner has premiered at one of four film festivals: Cannes, the Venice Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, or the Toronto International Film Festival. Parasite premiered at Cannes, as did Hollywood. But 1917 premiered at the Royal Command Film Performance, a charity event attended by the British royal family. The last Best Picture winner to be shown there was 1997’s Titanic. This festival trend feels like it could be a coincidence, but it certainly is weird.

There is no secret sauce that will allow you to beat Vegas or get an edge in your office’s Oscars pool. Cut through all the noise, and it’s clear that every contender has its flaws. So which film will win? Will 1917 win despite little attention from the acting and writing wings of the Academy? Can Parasite become the first foreign language film to win just a year after Roma failed to do so? Should Hollywood be counted out after it failed to break through in the pre-Oscars awards season? Or will another of the nine nominated films shock us all?

With recent history in mind, all I’m sure of is that I’m not sure of anything.