Predicting This Year’s Oscar Winners Using Just Math

There’s no denying that Sinners already pulled off one of the most impressive feats in the history of the Oscars, earning a record-smashing 16 nominations. To be fair, the model has no historical data on what it means to appear on the ballot that many times, because no film had ever done it before.

But we do have data on what it means to receive the most nominations in a given year, and it’s more of a mixed bag than one might expect. Excluding years when multiple films tied for the most nominations, a surprising 44 percent of films to lead the nomination counts did not win best picture. The model is much more convinced by One Battle After Another’s dominating run through nearly every best picture precursor. True, it lost the Actor Award for best cast to Sinners, but that’s not nearly enough to dethrone it from first place in the model’s eyes.

In the entire history of the Oscars, 41 individuals have been nominated in at least four separate competitive categories. Of those, there are only two people who have more than six career nominations yet no trophies to show for it: Bradley Cooper (12 nominations) and Paul Thomas Anderson (14 nominations). While this won’t be Cooper’s year just yet, it sure looks like it will be Thomas’. Between his One Battle After Another nominations for this category, best picture, and best adapted screenplay, he’ll get three bites at the apple to finally win his first Oscar.

If you have a coin handy, time to flip it. That’s about as effective a method of filling out your Oscar pool for best actor as any other. The math sees just a 0.9 percent difference between the leader – Michael B. Jordan (Sinners) – and the runner-up – Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme). Not to mention, Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) is also north of 20 percent to win, so perhaps a three-sided coin is in order.

We arrive at the only “easy” pick among the four acting races. I put easy in quotes since nothing is ever 100 percent in probabilities, but this is by far the most likely. Jessie Buckley (Hamnet) won a whole bunch of honors this awards season for her masterful, gut-wrenching performance, including a Golden Globe, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and Actor Award. Last stop: the Oscars.

There are no perfect resumes here. Delroy Lindo (Sinners) missed out on most of the key nominations. Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another) won a bunch of early awards but then faltered down the stretch at the more predictive ceremonies. Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein) won a Critics Choice Award but not enough other honors to cement his lead. Golden Globe winner Stellan Skarsgård has the misfortune of watching Sentimental Value’s shocking shutout from the Actor Award nomination lists.

That all meant that someone – anyone – still had a chance to jump out in front in the waning weeks of the race. And that’s exactly what Sean Penn (One Battle After Another) did, with eleventh-hour BAFTA and Actor Award wins. It’s hardly an airtight resume, but it’s enough for the lead.

Only once this century – and only eight times ever – has a film won best supporting actress with no other nominations: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), which took home a win for Penélope Cruz’s performance. That’s the uphill battle Amy Madigan (Weapons) will have to climb. And it’s not like she’s had a flawless path, either, with Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) winning the Golden Globe and Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners) taking the BAFTA. Her top two competitors come from films with a combined 29 nominations; her film has but one. But with no clear frontrunner, the Critics Choice and Actor Award wins are enough to give her the edge.

For all the talk of Sinners vs. One Battle After Another, the structure of the writing categories provides a brief respite, with Sinners landing under the original screenplay category and One Battle lining up in adapted. So if all goes according to chalk, both of them will get their well-deserved moment of recognition during the ceremony, and Ryan Coogler won’t go home empty-handed.

The list of films that have won screenplay honors from the Writers Guild, BAFTAs, Critics Choice, Golden Globes, and USC Scripter Award is not a long one: Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Up in the Air (2009), The Social Network (2010), and One Battle After Another. That’s a pretty compelling case to view Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel as the strong frontrunner. But don’t forget that Up in the Air suffered a memorable upset loss to Precious, reminding us that Oscar probabilities are never 100 percent.

The truth is, we don’t really know what’s going to happen in best casting, because it’s a new category with no historical data upon which to build a proper model. That said, I made my best attempt by polling 90 members of the Casting Society of America to generate the necessary training set. With that data in hand, Francine Maisler (Sinners) emerges as the most likely inaugural recipient of this award.

The best animated feature winners have often been pop culture phenomena, but it’s been a little while since the last true hit (Encanto) won this category. Enter KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s most popular movie ever, which looks primed to ride that momentum all the way to the Oscars. Odds are no one takes it down, but if someone does, look to another very successful film from 2025, Zootopia 2, hoping to join Toy Story as the only franchises to win this category more than once.

Often, the Academy tips its hand in the best international feature category via the other categories’ nominations. This year is a little different: For the first time in Oscar history, four films are nominated for both international feature and at least one other category. Still, even among those other nominations, there is some separation: Sirāt has a sound nomination, less consequential than It Was Just an Accident’s screenplay nomination, which in turn tells us less than Sentimental Value’s director nomination. The wild card is The Secret Agent’s casting nomination, which is presumably important but we have no historical data to tell us just how important.

It seems there’s never quite as much consensus in this category as sometimes appears in others, causing a fun challenge for Oscar predictors. That said, this year did provide a more clear signal than usual, with the majority of predictors lining up behind The Perfect Neighbor, the harrowing tale of a racially charged Florida shooting. Still, even in a relatively straightforward year, we saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin win the BAFTA and Come See Me in the Good Light earn National Board of Review recognition.

Every movie has a score, but few movies have the very meaning of music so thoroughly woven into their fabric. This century, among Oscar winners for best score, only La La Land and Soul truly engaged with music on a deeper level. Now, Sinners is the odds-on favorite to join that list. If it does, it would mark Ludwig Göransson’s third victory (Black Panther, Oppenheimer), suddenly just two behind the legendary John Williams for the lead among living composers.

This category is a lot closer than some might realize. Yes, “Golden” was a smash hit from a popular film, which has been a recipe for Oscar success in the past (“Let It Go,” “Shallow,” “What Was I Made For?,” etc.). The model bakes all of that in, and yet it still sees plenty of upset potential in “I Lied to You,” fueled by the overall popularity of Sinners with Oscar voters, giving it just under a 1-in-3 chance to win.

For best picture, F1 is like its heroes at the start of the film – it gets to be a part of the race, but it starts in the back and doesn’t have much of a chance of winning. For best sound, however, the better analogy is the film’s ending, a strong competitor to win the whole thing. The film seamlessly blended every auto racing noise and line of dialogue at breakneck speed, and is favored over Sinners to win the Oscar.

Guillermo del Toro seems to be a good-luck charm for best production design, directing the winning films Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), and now favored to win for Frankenstein thanks to Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau’s work. That would be one behind Tim Burton’s record for the most directed films to win this category.

In the early going, Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Sinners) looked like she might run away with this race, winning critics circle honor after critics circle honor. Then, the momentum swung the other way: Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another) took home fewer but more predictive awards in the BAFTAs and American Society of Cinematographers, and simultaneously opened a sizable lead in the betting markets. That flipped the standings and put One Battle ahead, but by less than 5 percent.

Chalk up another for Frankenstein, which holds a statistical lead in three categories as we head down the stretch. The entire premise of this film is about a scientist building a creature by hacking together parts of numerous deceased men. What an effort it was by Mike Hill, Jordan Samuel, Cliona Furey, and the rest of their team to so convincingly make it look to the viewer that Jacob Elordi was not one man but instead a jigsaw-like collection of body parts gifted the breath of life.

The three artistic categories in which Frankenstein holds the highest odds – production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling – are all somewhat related, in that they directly pertain to the visuals of the film. So, it’s perhaps a bit surprising that only five films have swept that trio: Amadeus (1984), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Poor Things (2023). If everything were to go exactly according to math – hardly a guarantee – Frankenstein would join that list.

Enough of the precursor awards lined up behind One Battle After Another that it’s made its way into pole position, but the more interesting battle is for second place. While One Battle and Sinners won the top two Eddie Awards, the American Cinema Editors have a surprisingly weak recent track record in lining up with the Oscars. That allows F1, the winner of the Critics Choice Award (not a terrific Oscar film editing predictor in its own right), to barely reach second place, the most likely winner should One Battle underperform.

Each Avatar movie has slipped a little in the Academy’s eyes, going from the three-win initial installment, to the one-win second film, to the third film missing out on a best picture nod. But one constant has held steady, and that’s the voters’ affinity for the franchise’s visual effects. Both of the first two films won this category, and if Fire and Ash were to join that list, the franchise would tie The Lord of the Rings as the only ones to win three competitive visual effects Oscars.

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There isn’t enough data to predict the three short film categories mathematically, though betting markets currently favor Two People Exchanging Saliva for Live-Action Short, Butterfly for Animated Short, and All the Empty Rooms for Documentary Short.

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Perhaps in a weaker year, either One Battle After Another or Sinners could fully run the table. But in this strong year for Hollywood, the two of them seem destined to watch one another take the stage all night long.

Ben Zauzmer is the author of Oscarmetrics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood.