Betting and futures markets have proven to be good predictors of outcomes across a number of different fields: Politics, sports, commodities, sales, even movie box office. There’s a few reasons for this.
Money is a great motivator that eliminates personal preference of what someone wants to see happen. Sure, if you are a Giants fan, you are more likely to bet on your team, but if you aren’t liking what you are seeing from your team, you are likely to lay off.
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People base predictions on a number of different factors: history, numbers, analysis (their own and professionals), as well as their observations and anecdotal experience from the world around them. No one method is absolutely right, and each has its value, which is why the advantage of betting markets is all of these factors get brought into play by those who place bets. Healthy markets are also proven to quickly self-correct, as well as be particularly (some would say too much so) sensitive to trends, momentum shifts, and the latest news.
This is why professional gamblers, or sharps, are less about the binary of picking winners, and rather focus on finding value. When the herd overreacts, and collectively moves the money line or point spread too far in one direction, the smart money gets on the other side — in fact, Vegas relies on the smart money to correct lopsided odds and stablilize its markets.
The last four weeks of the 2025 Oscar race provided the smart money some extremely lopsided odds that provided some extremely high value that was rare so close to the event. Considering how reliable betting markets can be, it’s been revealing to watch how poorly equipped it’s been to handle what has been perceived as a close race, supplying smart gamblers the opportunity to make a fortune, regardless of who wins on Sunday.
Regardless if you believe the current favorite “Anora” is a lock to win Best Picture on Sunday, it is fair to say this six-month horse race, unlike last year, went a long time without a clear and dominant frontrunner. In 2024, “Oppenheimer” was that rare film that checked off all the boxes: A beloved film (passionate support), with detractors who still respected it (limited backlash), that was a strong craft and acting play (cross branch support), made by a well-respected auteur at a studio (not a streamer) that performed theatrically (“Barbenheimer”!!), and had that politics were appealing and felt “important,” but that was not especially controversial. As one Academy member, who didn’t particularly love “Oppenheimer,” told me, “I voted for it because it’s what I want Hollywood to be.”
‘Oppenheimer’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
Both before and after the “Emilia Perez” tweet implosion, this year’s crop of leading Oscar candidates were an eclectic group of films that checked off two, maybe three boxes, but often different ones. It was a relatively flat race, that could’ve easily pivoted in a variety of different directions — and with the political chaos of the new Trump administration, what Hollywood would want to celebrate on its biggest stage was as unpredictable as the next insane news alert that comes across your phone.
But a multi-film, competitive race was not what was reflected in the betting odds in the last four weeks before the ceremony.
In February, there were two different, but heavily favorited front-runners, “The Brutalist” and “Anora,” that both peaked at a betting line of -240, which implies a 70-percent chance of winning, and only pays out $41.67 on a $100 bet.
Meanwhile, each of the five leading Best Picture candidates hit these lows at different points over the last four weeks:
“Anora” +700
“The Brutalist” +700
“Conclave” +1600
“Complete Unknown” +4000
“Wicked” +6500
That is absurd. Each one of these bets would have been smart. In fact, if you put $100 on each film as the pendulum swung way too far against it, you’d be guaranteed a profit (ranging from $200-$5,800) regardless of who wins.
Just to put in perspective the variance down the home stretch of this close race, in the last four weeks both “The Brutalist” and “Anora” fluctuated between a 12-percent and 70-percent chance of winning, with a hundred dollar bet going from paying out $41.67 to $700. The variance of “Conclave” money line in just this last week was even crazier, with the pay out from a $100 bet dropping from $1600 to $300.
It’s revealing to consider for a moment why the relatively stable gambling market could not handle a relatively close Oscar race, compared to say the competitive 2024 Presidential Election.
Imagine for a moment, if in the lead up to the 2024 election, or even the post-election analysis, all we knew was that Trump won in 2016, and lost in 2020. We didn’t know if it was by 1 vote or 50 million votes. We didn’t know how he performed in Michigan or Georgia, with women, with Latinos and in either election.
Can you imagine what that analysis would be like? What about if before the Super Bowl, you didn’t know that the Eagles won the NFC Championship by 33-points, or any point totals or stats from their previous games.
Well, that’s the Oscars, and the subsequent guild awards, in which all we know is who won. There is no real statistical model to glean any real predictive insight. It’s with this lack of numbers, the betting market overreacts to any input. And it was into this void that came the nationally broadcast triumph of “The Brutalist” at the Golden Globes, which was happening at the same time most voters were just starting to see the film — prior to its December 20 limited release, the film was not widely screened, nor available on screener. The film did seem to have some momentum, which the Oscar prognosticators all noted.
‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet at the 2025 Golden GlobesPenske Media via Getty Images
Except, in what was still a relatively flat race with little to go on, the idea “The Brutalist” had a 70-percent chance of winning was silly. In February, with the guild awards, the betting markets started to get more inputs in the form of the guild awards, to which the pendulum of the gambling market made some equally big swings in the other direction.
No doubt, in the last week, you’ve likely heard some definitive sounding (but very cherry-picked) stat like “12 of the last 14 Best Picture winners…” The problem with these historical equivalencies goes beyond a lack of voting totals to give them any real predictive power, they are literally comparing apples to oranges. The historical equivalencies are incredibly weak sauce when you don’t factor in the radical shift that’s taken place in who votes for the Oscars over the last ten years, during which time the Academy has made a very public and concerted effort to diversify its membership, which subsequently got significantly younger in the process.
For the 2015 Oscars, there were 6,124 voting-eligible Academy members.
In 2025, it’s 10,894.
After decades of relative stability in the membership ranks, adding approximately 200 new members a year, the Academy welcomed 6,045 new members between 2015 and 2024, while pushing hundreds of older members out the door.
Anybody surprised that an indie director working outside the Hollywood system, like Sean Baker, is the leading Oscar candidate, also might be surprised Sean has been an Academy member for seven years. He was invited as part of the class of 2018 that welcomed a record-breaking 928 new members, 49 percent of whom were female, 38 percent people of color. But race and gender, although the stated intention, don’t tell the full story. That year, Baker entered a Directing Branch with a class dominated by Hollywood outsiders: Lee Chang-dong, Béla Tarr, Chloé Zhao, Hong Sang-soo, just to name a few. If you look at the new inductees to the craft branches, for example Cinematography, in 2018, the new members were predominately not only foreign-born, but actively working outside of the U.S. and Hollywood. And this was the repeated pattern from 2016 to 2020, and to a lesser degree in 2021-2024, when Academy new membership dropped to 350-500 per year.
Many of these historical equivalancy stats you’ve been hearing involve the guild awards, which suffer from the same lack of vote totals and apple-to-oranges problems. But even putting that aside, the real direct correlation between guild awards and the Oscars is with predicting the nominations, not the winners. While not a one-to-one, there is a correlation between Academy’s Cinematography branch, which selects the five Oscar nominees in that category, to the members voting on the ASC award nominations. But, after nominations, the entire Academy votes (members from all branches) on who will win the Best Cinematography Oscar. So, the fact that the ASC gave Ed Lachman its top prize for “Maria” last weekend is irrelevent to how the actors, producers, musicans, and costumers voted who would win the Best Cinematography Oscar the week prior.
Sans a clear front-runner, the reality is until we have DGA and SAG results, we have little in the way of numbers or history to actually predict who win the Oscars. Both the SAG and DGA matter because of their sheer size, and less because of their equivalency.
The DGA is 17,000 union paying members working in the industry. Beyond directors, it includes assistant directors, locations managers, and UPMs (which means it sneakily includes a lot of producers). It’s a somewhat decent cross-section of people working in the industry, which doesn’t directly correspond to the Oscar voters, but is a large enough sample size that is likely able to capture a general sentiment of the industry. The same is true of the more than 160,000 actors, stunt performers, voice actors, and media professionals who are eligibile to vote for the SAG awards. Beyond supplying another large sample size of industry professionals, it’s worth noting the Acting Branch is the largest in the Academy with 1,258 members, or 12.7 percent of the total membership.
So it’s after these two groups weigh in, that the gambling market can actually start to take hold, but not before the smart money could take advantage.
Sean Baker accepts a Directors Guild of America Feature Film Medallion for ‘Anora’Getty Images for DGA
The reality is the 10,000-plus members of the Academy are a predictable herd, just not by normal metrics. These are people who rose to the top of their field in filmmaking. A huge percentage are successful actors, ace artisans, or Hollywood gatekeepers working for studios, producers, agents and publicists, most of whom live inside the insular and gated bubble of the Los Angeles movie world, with a smaller percentage stationed in New York, London, and other major European metropolitan areas with healthy film communities. This group is predictable, just not by statistical models or using the larger population.
They are an insular group that works and socializes with each other, and there are events and moments that move the needle, or in which their preferences can be observed. I’m not an Oscar prognosticator, but every year I’ve gone to the Camerimage Film Festival — where the international cinematography community gathers to share their latest work, talk shop, and party for a week in Poland — I’ve walked away with a very clear sense of which three films are a lock for a Best Cinematography nomination, and which four films are competing for the remaining two slots.
I’ve read and heard a lot of Oscar prognosticator-bashing lately, including by high-profile colleagues who should know better — who in the same breath reveal their own ignorance quoting some cherry-picked historical equivalency stat. But the reality is the good Oscar reporters are repeating what I experience at Camerimage, from September to March, six days and nights a week. They are at the screenings, events, and parties where you can sense how the herd is moving. And it’s in reading the good ones, that a real Oscar-ologist or gambler could have deduced this race didn’t have a 70-percent favorite in January and made a fortune.
I always find it ironic that Oscar prognosticators are judged based on how they pick the binary results of who wins or loses tomorrow night, when the reality is their value came in the weeks and months beforehand. Their intel and analysis and picks are now well-baked into the Oscar odds that have finally stabilized and are now properly weighing the race. But sure, I can’t wait to read you boasting on social media how you did better in your Oscar pool, while the smart money laughs its way to the bank.
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