my Oscar ballot stats

As last year was the first Oscar season I had with my blog, I went through my old ballots from all my parties and Entertainment Weekly to get my stats. That is, how many winners I correctly predicted and how many Dave Karger at EW successfully foretold. This is something I am certain that I obsess on and no one else really cares about. That's ok. I like that by adding the info to my blog, it is documented, saved for posterity and I can find it at any time.

Last year Laura and I tied with 17 correct predictions. Dave Karger at Entertainment Weekly correctly estimated 16. I did not improve from my past two years of predicting 19 out of 24 categories correctly. I did however best my Oscar idol, so that's something. For 2012 I have the same goal I had last year, to get more than 19 correct. Doing better than last year will be good too. It will be interesting to see if the new Best Picture rules make it more difficult to make predictions. In 2010 and 2011 there were 10 nominated films for Best Picture. In previous contemporary years, there were 5 nominated movies for Best Picture. This year there will be between 5 and 10 nominated movies for Best Picture. Each film has to receive 5% of the overall number 1 votes. Karger predicts that there will be 7 movies nominated for Best Picture this year: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Tree of Life and War Horse. His conclusion is that if there is an 8th film it will be Moneyball but his hunch is that there will be "the lucky seven." Most categories have 5 nominated films, Best Animated Feature and Best Song have very specific rules and vary from 3 to 5 nominations each year.

My stats:
2011: 17/24 KG; 16/24 DK
2010: 19/24 KG; 19/24 DK -- tie

2009: 19/24 KG; 21/24 DK

2008: 14/24 KG; 15/24 EW
2007: no record saved KG; 12/24 DK
2006: 15/24 KG; 17/24 DK
2005: 15/24 KG; 17/24 EW
2004: the year of my first party, didn't save any ballots; 21/24 DK
--the EW years are times that DK predicted the major categories and other writers reported on/predicted the remaining categories.