Get your popcorn ready, because the 2024 Academy Awards are just around the corner!

Sunday award shows are coming to a close, with the ultimate accolades taking place on Sunday, March 10. All you need is your access to your preferred choice of viewing, a subscription to ABC, and your self-proclaimed predictions.

If you are someone like me who religiously follows the Oscars and is encapsulated with curiosity, then you have most likely looked up the projected winners of each category at some point before the awards air.

I will happily admit that every year I test my own luck with what movies and celebrities I believe will win. In doing so, I have noticed that there is a certain glory in being right in my predictions. Along with getting my own guesses right, an additional thrill was captured as I started to read more Oscar prediction stories from publications such as Variety, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly. As the awards began airing, I discovered that almost 100% of the time the predictions I had read became true right in front of my eyes.

My amazement by the predictions materializing before me began to twist into an uncanny feeling of suspicion. With this new-found wonder, I went down my own rabbit hole to discover for myself why people seem to have so much success when accurately predicting the Oscar winners.

See, here’s the deal: what makes a movie Oscar award-worthy? In my eyes, it is the originality of a story mixed with the perfectly intertwined elements of cinematography and sound. These aspects of films are what separates “Barbie” from “The Zone of Interest” in my eyes.

I mean, seriously, is “Barbie” really nominated for Best Picture?

Using “Barbie” as an example, it is easy to realize why this movie would be nominated in the first place. One reason for its multiple nominations is that the movie started a now iconic pop-culture trend called Barbiecore that consists of everyone and their mother updating their entire wardrobe to pink, stylish clothes and accessories.

If you ask me, though, I think “Oppenheimer” will collect the accolade.

This leads me to my first realization about why the Oscars are so easy to predict. You do not have to think hard or look very far to find the answer to who will win. There are a plethora of other award shows whose winners usually align with the Oscars. Also, if the movie was popular, it would most likely already be nominated for another, similar award. One prime example being “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri,”  which happened to not only sweep the Oscars in 2018, but also went on to win in the same categories at various award shows such as the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the British Academy Film Awards.

There are a plethora of other award shows whose winners usually align with the Oscars.

According to Samantha West in her article for The Washington Post, looking at past award shows can be the indicator one needs to hopefully be right in their prediction.

“Nine out of the past 10 years, one of the Golden Globe winners for best actress in a drama or comedy/musical went on to win the Oscar for best actress,” said West.

These odds aren’t shocking, as our society is constantly enthralled with popularity, extending beyond social factors and into the entertainment industry as a whole. Award shows only seem to validate what the public deems as ‘popular,’ and this is demonstrated through the same movies winning multiple awards at every award show.

Timing is also a defining factor in my eyes. A common term thrown around between movie aficionados is participating in an ‘Oscar binge,’ which refers to the outrageous amount of time spent watching all the movies with Oscar buzz all at once, usually either at the end of the year or the beginning of the new year. Personally, as soon as the first Oscar prediction story is published, I start my binge.

How this relates to prediction, though, is the fact that a staggering percentage of movies nominated for an Oscar happen to be released within the last few months of the year.

According to Zach Kram, a writer for The Ringer, the majority of movies that are nominated for an Oscar have an interesting quality in common of being released at the end of a given year. While this might not seem out of the ordinary, I think it’s suspicious.

“About half the winners in the Big Four awards categories went to movies with release dates from January through September, and half went to movies with release dates from October through December,” said Kram.

Fifty percent of award winners across all categories being released in the last three months of the year, while the other 50% are sprawled out between the other nine is all the validation I need to feel vindicated in my viewpoint on predictions.

This all remains true for the 2024 Oscars season, as 13 out of the 31 movies nominated this year were released in the last three months of 2023, equating to 42% of Oscar nominated films being released at the end of the previous year.

If broken down by the amount of Oscar nominated films released per month, there was an average of two released between January to September, while about four films were released each month between October and December. See what I’m getting at here?

The final and most obvious way that the Oscars are easy to predict comes when the Academy directly releases their list of nominations. If a movie is nominated for several awards then it’s a no-brainer, they are bound to pick up a few.

My argument about “Oppenheimer” winning best picture is based on the other 13 nominations the movie has amassed. Who’s to say that they won’t take home many more?

When “Everything Everywhere All At Once” was also nominated for 13 awards at the 2023 Oscars, it took home a solid seven. At the 2021 Oscars, “Nomadland” was nominated for 10 awards and took home three. The odds are simply written by the Academy themselves, or so I believe.

It is not hard to accurately predict how the most popular movies of the different award shows are going to amass their winnings based on these factors. It’s up to us and our own self-predictors to narrow down our decisions, but not being 100% sure who will win is part of the fun.

The Oscars are predictable, and they continue to rise in predictability every year. I just hope “Barbie” doesn’t completely mess up my chances of having a clean sweep in my own predictions this year.

If you are curious, here are my personal predictions for the five biggest awards of the night, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay.

Best Picture: “Oppenheimer”

Best Director: Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”

Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, “Oppenheimer”

Best Actress: Emma Stone, “Poor Things”

Best Screenplay: “Oppenheimer”