For all the talk about how much the Academy Awards have changed in recent years, one key facet has remained remarkably constant: the category lineup. Aside from the two sound categories merging, there have been no changes to the list of Oscar categories since best animated feature was introduced in 2001.
This year, that changes. Casting directors are finally getting their due. This poses a rather unique challenge for forecasters. This is my 15th year predicting the Academy Awards using only math, so what’s an Oscar prognosticator to do when the historical data simply doesn’t exist? Training data is the meal that feeds the model!
I decided to try and build up that data. To do so, I turned to the experts: the casting directors themselves.
I reached out to the Casting Society, and to my deep gratitude, they were happy to help. They
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