Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Stats Guru Predicts Oscar Wins for ‘Lincoln’, Spielberg

February 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Daniel Day-Lewis in 'Lincoln'

Are you going with the conventional wisdom that Argo has a lock on a Best Picture Academy Award? If so, you might want to think twice before filling out that Oscar pool. Iain Pardoe is leaning in another direction. Pardoe, who has a Ph.D. in statistics, is an independent statistical consultant and mathematics/statistics instructor based in British Columbia. In the mid-2000s, working with psychologist and pop cultural scholar Dean Keith Simonton, he came up with an Oscars prediction model. Restricting his predictions to the four top categories, he has been remarkably successful, getting ... Read More

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Predicting Oscars for Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock

March 4, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Among its many benefits, academic research can help you win the office Oscar pool. Just go to the Web site of Iain Pardoe, who holds the Hamletesque title of associate professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon. In a 2008 edition of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Pardoe explained how he and his collaborator, Dean Keith Simonton, came up with a prediction model based on “discrete choice models.” Utilizing statistics dating back to 1936, they have determined that certain factors make getting an Academy Award more likely (receiving a Golden Globe, or ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2010, Media, Research in Summary
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Does an Academy Award Really Denote Quality?

March 3, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

A continuing debate among cineasts is whether the Academy Awards truly reward the best films of the year, or whether they’re highly publicized popularity contests. While the gap between critics’ top 10 lists and Oscar nominees has narrowed significantly over the past decade, conventional wisdom holds that truly groundbreaking work is seldom appreciated by the aesthetically conservative Academy. The research points in different directions. In a 2004 edition of the Creativity Research Journal, University of California, Davis, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton looked at 1,132 films that had ... Read More

More like this: Culture, March-April 2010, Research in Summary
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Counting the Stars

November 5, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Metacritic.com is an acclaimed Web site that combines thousands of media reviews of entertainment offerings — movies, games, books and albums — into a Metascore, a sort of weighted average of critics' reviews that ranges from zero to 100. Analysis of just a small subset of the site's information shows the power of numbers to confirm — or defy — expectation. The Actors The colored horizontal bars on this chart present a graphical representation of the distribution of scores given to movies in which each of the listed actors appear. The numbers inside the bars represent the average ... Read More

More like this: Graphic Art, Media, November-December 2009
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Critics’ Input Colors Consumer Choices

August 15, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

A new study showing how certain film critics can influence box office gross has implications beyond the multiplex. The basic findings also apply where "people can't evaluate (consumer goods) or don't want to bother evaluating and are willing to cede their decisions to someone else," said Peter Boatwright, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie-Mellon University and one of the study's co-authors. "Reviewing the Reviewers: The Impact of Individual Film Reviewers on Box Office Performance" identified two different types of critics: influencers, whose opinions correlate with early ... Read More

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Film Critics: A Boys’ Club

July 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press all have female movie reviewers, but don't let that fool you: Film criticism in the nation's newspapers remains "largely a male enterprise," according to a new study. The study was written by Martha M. Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. It is available on the Web site of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Lauzen looked at film criticism in the top 100 U.S. newspapers by circulation in the fall of 2007. She found that 70 percent of the individuals ... Read More

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