If internet chatter is any indicator, James Franco, Natalie Portman and The King's Speech are going to be among the big Oscar winners Sunday, according to social media monitoring firm Meltwater.
Things didn't go so well for Meltwater when they took a similar stab at the Grammys two weeks ago, so we're impressed they want to get right back up on the horse. (Update: Meltwater was two for three this time: The King's Speech and Natalie Portman won, but James Franco lost).
Social media monitoring isn't so much predicting as it is, in the best case, showing how well-aligned the thinking of stakeholders is with an uninvested rooting section. Meltwater didn't go out on a limb much with such Grammy picks as pop 'tween heartthrob Justin Bieber for Best New Artist. But that honor went instead to relatively obscure Esperanza Spaulding, who had about 6.5 percent of Bieber's social media score.
Feel their pain: Spaulding was the first jazz musician to win a Grammy in this category, and unprecedented is hard to predict.
"Right" is almost not the point. Using social media channels to approximate a water-cooler consensus can be invaluable to stakeholders one way or another because it can expose an anti-intuitive disconnect with fans or clients — at least as far as filtering a loud and unstructured forum is concerned.
But big-time awards ceremonies aren't popularity contests, except among the select few who actually get to pick the winners. In the case of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that number is in the mid-thousands. Many Monday morning analysts accuse of them being out of touch with reality, but it is a pretty good sampling size. That said, there are about twice as many voting Grammy members. I'd love to see a prediction next year about The Golden Globes, which are decided by a mere few-dozen people and yet are considered excellent indicators of who will prevail at the Oscars.
The Academy Awards are perhaps "the most gambled upon non-sporting event outside of the presidency," PopEater says, so there are some good metrics from people putting their money where their mouths are versus people just mouthing off.
Like much of the betting, and a majority of film critics, the advance zeitgeist per Meltwater is that The King's Speech is favored to win Best Picture. However, it is not the blowout in the social conversation as it is to gamblers, who put the film at a 2/9 favorite at this writing in one pool. Sci-Fi Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle Inception is only a hair behind, which may actually be a dream. The Social Network, generally considered the closest competitor to The King's Speech, is third.
Best Actor goes to Oscars co-host Franco — a distant second in the betting pool to Speech's Colin Firth, who has been the critical darling this awards season.
Only Portman of Black Swan is on top with gamblers, critics and in the social channels as the pick for Best Actress.
For the record, Meltwater competitor Zeta Interactive told The Hollywood Reporter it has Firth beating Franco (which is the conventional wisdom) and The Social Network edging out Kings Speech (which is not). But it agrees that this is Portman's year.
This sort of thing is still more an art than a science, since heated conversations in social media bubble up all the time for no reason that's apparent to a wider audience.
Meltwater "monitored all conversations dating back to Jan. 25, when the nominees were announced, but also cross-checked back to Jan. 20 to make sure the conversation was genuinely about the nominee in relation to the Oscars," a spokesman said. "Doing this, we expected to see a spike in conversation on the 25th, and that is what happened in all cases.
"Meltwater searched for instances of each nominee (the movie title or actor/actress name) juxtaposed with Oscar-related terms to make sure the conversation was relevant, and in the case of best actor filtered out the word ‘host’ so that discussion of Franco as the Oscar host would not cloud the results. As you can see, though, he’s still the most popular."
And that is where consensus, however precisely monitored, falls apart. Consider this: according to Rotten Tomatoes, the most positively reviewed film of the year is Best Picture nominee Toy Story 3. If that animated sequel won, it would be an earth-shattering upset by anyone's reckoning, apart from maybe Steve Jobs.
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