Betting On The OSCARS: Why Avatar Won't Win Best Picture

This past week, Avatar surpassed Titanic to become the highest grossing film in the history of the world. A few weeks earlier, it picked up the Golden Globe award for Best Drama, which is considered to be a strong predictor of the Best Picture Oscar. The movie is mesmerizing fans worldwide with its spectacular visuals, attracting criticism from all the right people (the Vatican, neo-conservatives), and, in Taiwan, has even resulted in death from overexcitement. 

So why wouldn’t a film with this level of popularity win the Best Picture Oscar?

In case you don't remember, a few months ago I interviewed noted financial analyst, amateur statistician, and degenerate gambler Vincent Shen about the 2008 Presidential election. He not only predicted the Obama win, but made some nice scratch off it too. Can he work his same magic during Oscar time?

Why won’t Avatar win the Oscar?

A number of reasons. First, you need to consider the composition of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). There are approximately six thousand voting members, and these are the people who will be collectively deciding the outcome of the race. They are actors, directors, writers, producers, and various technical people.

AMPAS memberships are not doled out to just anyone. Most are accomplished industry players who’ve had their membership card for a long time. Which means that most of them are old. And old people generally aren’t turned on by science fiction in the same way that the under-thirty crowd (i.e. the people who buy theater tickets) is turned on by it. That’s why the Academy has never given the award to a science fiction movie, even in 1977 when another game-changing sci-fi blockbuster broke all box office records (Star Wars lost to Annie Hall that year).

Second, AMPAS members like to spread the wealth around. They tend not to reward the same filmmaker’s films more than once, unless that filmmaker has a large and impressive body of work – Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone come to mind. (And of those three, only Clint Eastwood films have won more than one Best Picture award.) James Cameron’s body of work may or may not be impressive, depending on whom you ask, but it certainly isn’t large. His most recent fiction film before Avatar was Titanic, and that was twelve years ago.

Third, although Avatar’s visuals are impressive, the writing is weak.  It’s essentially a rehash of the “going native” plotline (e.g. Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, District 9, countless others) in which the main character discovers, through interactions with “the natives”, that the real enemy is his former or current employer.

I’m not trying to disparage James Cameron’s writing abilities here – he plainly acknowledges his reliance on the formula. Rather, I’m simply pointing out that AMPAS voters are more sophisticated than the average movie-goer and they will take the quality of the story into consideration.  That’s why Best Picture winners are almost always accompanied by at least a nomination for screenwriting. Not true in the case of Avatar.

Any other factors?

Those are some of the stronger qualitative arguments. But here’s the real reason why Avatar will not win.

The Oscar race, at its core, is an election. And just like in a presidential election, if you are able to determine the intention of a random sample of the voters through polling, then you will be able to predict the outcome of the election with a high degree of accuracy.

What polling? There’s no polling.

Ah, but there is. In fact, there have been three polls in the past couple of weeks: the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Directors Guild Awards, and the Producers Guild Awards. Each of these awards are voted on, in large part, by guild members who are also members of AMPAS. Together, these three groups – actors, directors, and producers – represent almost forty percent of AMPAS voters.  Therefore, you could say that 40% of the “voting public” has been polled as to their preferences, and guess what – not a single guild gave their top award to Avatar – Hurt Locker won the DGA and PGA and Inglorious Basterds won the SAG.

Add the Writers Guild, who give out their awards later this month (like the SAG, WGA didn’t even grant Avatar a nomination), and the poll’s sample size increases to approximately 45% of the “voting public”. In order for Avatar to overcome this disadvantage, the other 55% of AMPAS voters would have to vote for it by overwhelming margins. And if you understand statistics, then you’ll know that this outcome is extremely unlikely – outside the threshold of significance, a statistician might say.

Granted, the guild awards are not true scientific polls because they’re technically not random samples, and the analytical methodology I’ve used isn’t perfect. But if you go back and look at the records, you’ll find that there has never been a Best Picture winner that lost all four guild awards and then went on to win the Oscar. It just doesn’t happen.

Interesting.  But what about the fact that it’s the highest grossing film of all time. Doesn’t that factor in?

Titanic notwithstanding, box office gross is not a strong predictor of Oscar success. As I mentioned, Star Wars was the highest grossing film of all time in 1977, and it lost. The Dark Knight was the highest grossing film last year, and it wasn’t even nominated, as some had expected (not me).

In fact, grossing a large amount of money could actually work against the movie at voting time.  If the narrative of a David vs. Goliath (David being The Hurt Locker) starts to take serious hold, Avatar could suffer, since no one likes to side with Goliath.

What about the fact that Avatar won Best Picture at the Golden Globes? Doesn’t that give it momentum?

The general tenet that people overlook when using the Golden Globes as an Oscar predictor is that correlation does not equal causation. In the case of the guild awards, there is a clear causal link – the people who vote for the winners in the first contest are the same people who, at least partially, vote for the winners in the second contest. The Golden Globes winners, on the other hand, are decided by a bunch of jokers with no credentials.  Any “momentum” that might have been gained at that time has since worn off with the guild awards.

Speaking of the Globes, if you saw James Cameron’s awkward acceptance speech, you just can’t shake the feeling that this guy is an ass.  Now don’t get me wrong – he has made some terrific films (the best being Terminator 2).  And I’m sort of quasi-proud and hopeful that a Canadian can achieve this level of success in the film world. But a man who stands in front of a billion people and declares himself the king of the world – and then moments later asks for a moment of silence in honour of a bunch of dead people that he has just finished exploiting – will no doubt leave a bad taste in the mouths of many Academy voters, even twelve years later.

AMPAS voters, like all voters, are people.  And all people take into account the behaviour of their candidates before they cast their vote, even when their behaviour or personality is irrelevant to the contest at hand.  If you’re an AMPAS voter who is a little peeved at James Cameron’s arrogance, is there a better retribution than elevating his ex-wife over him in front of a billion people (in both the director and picture categories)?  I think not.

Does Avatar have anything going for it at all?

The only thing Avatar really has going for it is that it has become an “event” movie, like Titanic.  If it wins, it will be because the members of AMPAS have surrendered to the herd mentality, and have collectively decided to march single-file into the anus of time on the perceived historical significance of Avatar.

Let me say that Avatar, like Star Wars, deserves its place in cinematic history as one of the films that advanced the craft of filmmaking to the next stage. But advance the art of storytelling it did not. Being more sophisticated than Golden Globe voters, I think that AMPAS voters realize this.

So who do you think will win the Oscar, smartass?

Barring some unforeseen development, Hurt Locker looks to be the clear winner at this point, having won two of the three guild awards so far.  A second possibility is that Inglourious Basterds could take Best Picture – you heard it here first – since it did win the SAG, and actors far outnumber any other group in AMPAS. This was the case in 2005, when Crash upset Brokeback Mountain. So I think it’s between Inglourious and Hurt Locker.

An additional wrinkle in this year’s race is that AMPAS has changed the Best Picture vote to a preferential instant run-off system, where voters rank the films from best to worst, and the ballots of the last place film get recounted on the next round of tallying based on the voter’s second choice – sort of like how Olympic host cities are chosen. In the past, I would have been concerned that Inglourious and Hurt Locker could split the votes, resulting in Avatar coming up middle. To be honest, I don’t know whether an instant run-off system will mitigate or amplify this effect.

If Avatar wins, how much money will you give me? (And I want this in writing)

OK, I offer you the following terms: if Avatar wins Best Picture, I will award you and all your readers an amount equal to the product obtained when the quotient obtained by dividing your annual salary by the greater of (A) the worldwide theatrical gross of Avatar, or (B) Avatar’s production budget multiplied by the number of clichés in the movie, is multiplied by the number of science fiction films to win the Best Picture Oscar before 2010.

Good luck on your Oscar pool, everyone… May the force be with you.