OSCARS 2011: The Formula

I came up with a fool-proof (laugh, eye-roll, sarcastic tone) formula to predict this year's best picture winner.  I've done this formula thing in the past, and I'll be curious to see how it pans out.  Here is how I developed it.

First, since the Academy members don't change that much from year to year, I looked at their last five winners to pull out common factors in the movies they usually choose.  The pictures:

*The Hurt Locker 
*Slumdog Millionaire 
*No Country for Old Men 
*The Departed 
*Crash 

Then I looked for some common traits - things that appear in all five of them.  Here's what's obvious:

Live Action

Rated R

Dramas

Director Nominated for Best Director Oscar

Now, here are this year's nominees.  

127 Hours

Black Swan

The Fighter

Inception

The Kids Are All Right

True Grit

The King's Speech

The Social Network

Toy Story 3

Winter's Bone

Now, here is the list of nominees if we weed out those films that don't meet our four things posted above:

Black Swan

The Fighter

The King's Speech

The Social Network

Next, I dug a little deeper into the past winners and found one very interesting fact - of numerous awards shows and honors (IMDB.com lists past winners in many categories for many award listings) only one group has matched all of the best pictures for the past five years.  The Satellite Awards, which are distributed by the International Press Academy, have awarded movies their best picture honor, and for the past five years, that same movie would go on to win Oscar gold.  Their pick (already announced in December) for this year is one of the four above.  So if history were to repeat itself, the film that would win best picture would be.....

(Click to Find Out)

Surprised?  So, while this is nowhere near scientific, I think it's fun to analyze...and this year I think they'll be right on the money.