More from Ben Zauzmer
Oscars’ Best Casting Award: Which Movies Would’ve Won Over 96 Years of Academy History?
For the first time in a quarter century, a new Oscar category is upon us. Beginning in 2026, honoring films from 2025, the Academy will recognize the best casting of the year. It’s a long-overdue and well-deserved recognition for the casting directors who place such an integral building block in a film’s production but have […]
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Predicting This Year’s Oscar Nominations Using Just Math
For the first seven decades of Oscar history, the Academy Awards and the general public were more or less in agreement on what constituted a “good” movie. Box office champions like Gone With the Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, […]
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Tony Awards: Predicting the Winners Using Just Math
To Washington Heights we go. The Tony Awards head to a new venue this year, the United Palace, but the excitement of honoring the year’s best in theater is the same as ever. If, like me, you can’t wait for Sunday night’s event to begin, that’s where math can come in. Similar to the Oscars, […]
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Predicting This Year’s Oscar Winners Using Just Math
When it comes to silver screen fame, acting is king. Onscreen talent gets the most publicity time on talk shows. They garner the most headlines. They draw the highest number of flashbulbs on the red carpet. And outside of best picture, the categories I’m most often asked about are the four that honor acting. In […]
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Predicting This Year’s Oscar Nominations Using Just Math
Math may one day calculate the number of universes in the multiverse of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but it can’t comprehend how the relationship between a mother and daughter in just one of those universes can impact all the others. Math can measure the frames per second in a young Steven Spielberg’s camera, but […]
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How Often Do the Early Favorites Win Best Picture?
Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans is the early favorite to win the Oscar for best picture. Or maybe it’s Babylon. Or The Banshees of Inisherin, or Everything Everywhere All at Once, or Tár, or Top Gun: Maverick. For now, it depends on which expert you ask. We’re just days away from what some deem the […]
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How Much Does Box Office Really Impact Oscars TV Ratings?
While the pandemic didn’t help, viewership for the Oscars telecast, as well as the average box office returns of the films nominated for best picture, have been on a downward trend for years. Six of the past seven years of the telecasts on ABC saw a smaller audience than the year before. As for the […]
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Inside the Academy’s Inclusion Drive
In June 2020, when just about everyone’s attention was focused on the COVID-19 pandemic winding into its third grim month, the Academy quietly made history. With invitations sent to 819 new members that spring, the group surpassed the ambitious — and controversial — inclusion goals it had set in 2016, after the Twitter trend #OscarsSoWhite […]
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Predicting This Year’s Oscar Winners Using Just Math
The preferential ballot is many things to Oscar viewers. To the Academy itself, it’s a fairer way to build consensus around a best picture winner (but not the other 22 categories). To awards-watchers, it’s a source of consternation when they dislike a winner (say, Green Book over Roma). To the casual fans, it’s a term […]
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Predicting This Year’s Oscar Nominations Using Just Math
As we pass the two-year mark of the pandemic, we are also well underway in the second Hollywood awards season impacted by COVID-19. Already, we’ve seen postponements for the Grammys, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Producers Guild Awards, among others. And as a domino effect from last year’s Oscar delay, this year will be […]
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Tonys: Predicting the Musical Winners Using Math
My annual mathematical Tony predictions are meant to focus attention on the shows that received nominations, but almost as notable this year is what’s missing. A number of shows either missed the cutoff or never opened at all, due to the sudden shutdown of Broadway as the pandemic began. That includes musical revivals of West […]
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Tonys: Predicting the Play Winners Using Math
Seemingly no aspect of entertainment – or life, for that matter – has gone untouched by this pandemic. We’ve found new and creative ways to keep ourselves entertained these past 18 months, but many of the old ways endured some tough times that they’re still struggling to reemerge from. Very few types of entertainment were […]
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