A little more than a month ago, we tried to predict the Grammys. You might question the wisdom of trying to predict something that’s inherently unpredictable, but hey, above all else we were trying to have fun and in the end the whole exercise turned out . . . okay. We certainly wish we’d done better than four for nine, but there’s not much you can do when you get burned by some legitimate upsets. (On a related note, shoot us an email if you’d like to join us for “Kacey Musgraves Demolition Night,” which we’ll be hosting in the parking lot behind our building whenever spring arrives.)

Now the Oscars beckon. We didn’t send our CEO to California to appear on a prediction TV show this time around, so Hollywood’s white hot spotlight won’t be burning quite as hotly as it was in January, but we still want to make our official predictions public. That way if we get them all right we can scream, “LOOK WHAT WE DID!!!” (And if we’re wrong we’ll pretend it never happened.)

For those of you aren’t interested in reading all the details about how we arrived at each prediction, here they are:

Best Picture – Gravity
Best Director –  Alfonso Cuaron
Best Actor – Matthew McConaughey
Best Actress – Cate Blanchett
Best Supporting Actor –  Jared Leto
Best Supporting Actress –  Jennifer Lawrence
Best Adapted Screenplay –  Captain Phillips
Best Original Screenplay –  Her
Best Animated Feature – Frozen

HOW DID WE DO IT?

As with the Grammys, we asked tens of thousands of people, both across our polling universe and on a specific destination site, to predict who they thought would win each of the nine categories listed above. We did the same thing last year as well. In looking at how our 2013 respondents did, we also looked at how those people answered hundreds of other questions in our database, which gave us an idea of what types of people are good at predicting the Oscars.

While we followed the same general process to analyze these data, the people who did well predicting last year’s Oscars looked very different from the Grammys sharps. To give an idea of how things differed from the Grammys, consider age. Predicting the Grammys seems to be a young person’s game. Respondents under 30 consistently perform better than older respondents. But for the Oscars, it’s the Gen Xers (35-44 year old) who stood out. Another, seemingly unrelated attribute that repeatedly surfaced was strong support of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Before you say, “Well, of course, movie fans are more likely to be liberal,” know that there were many other political indicators we looked at that didn’t appear to be associated with one’s predictive ability at all. You just never know what you’re going to find when you engage in an exercise like this.

We also included valuable external data in our model. For example, it’s been well documented that, for certain Oscar categories, other award shows — particularly the various Guild awards, whose voters also vote for the Oscars — lend clues as to who the winners will be.

Now, with all that out of the way, here are our explanations for each category.

BEST PICTURE

Prediction: Gravity

Confidence Level: Low . . . but wouldn’t it be awesome if we were right?

Why It Should Win: Because it won the Producers Guild award (tied with 12 Years a Slave) and the Directors Guild award, both of which have been highly correlated with past Best Picture winners.

Why We Could Miss It: Because our “good predictors” and the betting odds say 12 Years a Slave is the heavy favorite. Also, our prediction swung depending on whether we included the Directors Guild award as a predictor. When we included it, Gravity came out on top. Without it, 12 Years a Slave won. We agonized over this one a little bit, but the Directors Guild award has been a strong predictor in the past. When in doubt, trust the data.

BEST DIRECTOR

Prediction: Alfonso Cuaron

Confidence Level: Beyond-the-atmosphere high

Why It Should Win: Everything — our respondents, the betting odds, the other award shows, etc. — point to this being an easy win for Cuaron.

Why We Could Miss It: Shit happens:

BEST ACTOR

Prediction: Matthew McConaughey

Confidence Level: Very high

Why It Should Win: See above.

Why We Could Miss It: Our good predictors were surprisingly high on Leonaro DiCaprio. Do they know something we don’t?

BEST ACTRESS

Prediction: Cate Blanchett

Confidence Level: Very high

Why It Should Win: This seems like a lock as well.

Why We Could Miss It: As with Best Actor, our respondents seem to think this is a lot closer than everyone else. They’re probably crazy, but if either Sandra Bullock or Amy Adams pull off what would appear to be a huge upset, we’ll be looking at the respondents who got that one right very closely.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Prediction: Jared Leto

Confidence Level: Very high

Why It Should Win: Three out of the four actor categories are shaping up to be very boring this year, and this is one of them.

Why We Could Miss It: Shit happens:

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Prediction: Jennifer Lawrence

Confidence Level: Mixed

Why It Should Win: Because that’s what our respondents and our model say will win. This award appears to be a two horse race between Lawrence and 12 Years a Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o, and we’re backing Lawrence.

Why We Could Miss It: Because this category appears to be a genuine toss up. If it’s Nyong’o’s name that happens to be inside the envelope, we’ll shrug our shoulders and get over this one pretty quickly.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Prediction: Captain Phillips

Confidence Level: Who knows

Why It Should Win: Because it won the Writers Guild Best Adapted Screenplay award, which has been a strong predictor of past winners, which strongly influenced our model’s final prediction.

Why We Could Miss It: Because the other predictors are all over the map. Both our respondents and the oddsmakers (who positively hate Captain Phillips‘s chances) seem to think 12 Years a Slave is the heavy favorite. The Wolf of Wall Street also has a fair amount of buzz, and it won the Critics Choice award. This is one of those awards where you really wish the actual voting numbers would be released so you could go back and figured out exactly what happened. As it is, one of these movies could win with 21% of the vote, and will retroactively seem like it was the obvious winner the whole time.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Prediction: Her

Confidence Level: Mixed

Why It Should Win: Our respondents and the oddsmakers are pretty evenly split on whether Her or American Hustle will win. Given that Her has performed well throughout awards season, our model has declared it to be the favorite of the two.

Why We Could Miss It: This seems as good a place as any to remind everyone of noted forecaster “Smooth” Jimmy Apollo’s enduring words of wisdom: “When you’re right 52% of the time, you’re wrong 48% of the time!”

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Prediction: Frozen

Confidence Level: High

Why It Should Win: This category is relatively young, so there’s less historical data to make use of, but our respondents, the oddsmakers, and all the other awards shows strongly indicate that Frozen will win this won pretty easily.

Why We Could Miss It: We don’t need to bring up Kacey Musgraves again, do we?

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