Sure, FiveThirtyEight can predict the Oscar winners with lots of “numbers” and “fancy statistics,” but what about the opinions of a dozen or so vocal nerds who spent most of their 2015 movie time playing Fallout 4?
When it comes to predicting the Best Picture winner at the 2016 Academy Awards, we may not be the best qualified. None of us saw Bridge of Spies, only one of us saw Room, and The Revenant, Spotlight, and Brooklyn didn’t fare much better. Hell, a third of us don’t even plan on watching the 2016 Oscars and 65% of iDigi writers responded that they either loathe the Oscars, find them mildly irritating, or are completely indifferent.
But our informal poll also covered the Oscar predictions that really matter. Who is the coolest person who will sneak a vape during the ceremony? Who do you most want to see LOSE Best Picture? And what horrible method will the 2016 Oscars use to exonerate themselves for #OscarsSoWhite?
Ever since Leonardo DiCaprio vaping at the Screen Actors Guild Awards inexplicably mattered to people, we’ve all wondered: who will be the next celebrity to do something innocuous and capture the attention of the whole world?
Meet our new fave celebrity couple: Leonardo DiCaprio and his vape pen https://t.co/bjzIfOiaVp pic.twitter.com/pg9GpyubGL
— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) January 31, 2016
When it comes to celebrities most likely to sneak a vape on-camera, thereby reaping the twitter appraisal whirlwind, iDigi writers offered up a number of candidates. We’d like to see JLaw, Kate Winslet, and Bryan Cranston hit some of that sweet, sticky vapor (they’re smoking weed, right?). One writer hopes to see a vape pen shrink to the apparent size of a golf pencil in Sylvester Stallone’s immense mitts.
In addition to strong opinions on celebrity vapes, iDigi writers had some thoughts on how the Academy Awards are likely to handle the #OscarsSoWhite debacle. Would the Academy joke about the exclusively white nominees in an effort to exonerate itself with self-awareness?
The general consensus seems to be that the 2016 Oscars would mostly ignore the controversy, but that Chris Rock would get in a few digs. “A full jokey musical number about white people” was another popular possibility. Performative privilege checking doesn’t actually change what Oscar voters have done, but it will make everyone feel a little better to in some way say, “we’re not really racist, look, we can make jokes about how white we are!”
Okay, but what about the movies? iDigi writers agree that The Revenant is most likely to win Best Picture, with votes split evenly between The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road on who should win. Plus, we really don’t want The Martian to win, with a third of the staff voting the Matt Damon sci-fi picture as the movie they’d most like to see lose Best Picture. It seems we prefer the post-apocalypse to an optimistic appraisal of human potential.
As for all the other nominees, you can find back-patting and hair-stroking for them everywhere else in the world. We have to get back to Fire Emblem.
