So-so results on Oscars

Number cruncher Nate Silver got four Oscar picks right and two wrong. The misses were for Supporting Actress (he said Taraji P. Henson instead of Penelope Cruz), and for Best Actor (he said Mickey Rourke instead of Sean Penn). Thing is, three of the four winning picks were near-cinches - Heath Ledger for Supporting Actor, Danny Boyle for Best Director, and "Slumdog" for Best Picture. So what to make of it all? In his postscript, Silver suspects that his model relied on too much subjectivity - the old garbage-in, garbage-out business. From fivethirtyeight.com:

In the Best Actor category, we might also have learned a thing or two last night. Namely, it probably doesn't help to be a huge jackass (like Mickey Rourke) to all of your peers when those peers are responsible for deciding whether you receive a major, life-altering award.

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The advantage in making a subjective judgment is that you may be able to account for information that is hard to quantify -- for example, Rourke's behavioral problems or the politics of Sean Penn playing a gay icon in a year where Hollywood felt very guilty about the passage of Proposition 8. The disadvantage is that human beings have all sorts of cognitive biases, and it's easy to allow these biases to color one's thinking. I would guess, for instance, that most critics would have trouble decoupling the question of who they thought should win the Oscars -- those performances they liked the best personally -- from who they thought actually would win them.

One site that's crowing today is Hubdub, which hit all six major awards.