The 90th Academy Awards are being held this Sunday, March 4th, and the Twitter-sphere is ablaze with Oscar talk. Almost half a million tweets have been written about this year’s awards, and as we approach the big night, that number will only continue to grow larger. In fact, the total post volume has grown by over 11,000 percent since February 7th, which saw 7,920 posts to March 1st’s 66,323 posts.
With the awards still a day away, what else is there to do other than to speculate wildly? The question of who will win is always on the mind of the Oscar viewer, so the interns here at SEE Suite have decided to try their hand at the guessing game.
Though the Oscars boast a myriad of categories (24 in all), ranging from Best Makeup all the way to Best Picture, we will be offering our hot takes on the top five most anticipated categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress. By pooling the conversation filtered by Oscar category, we were able to make educated guesses based on what Twitter movie buffs are working hard to will into existence, all so that you at home will sound cultured and informed when you make your own live predictions from the living room couch tomorrow night.
The conversation surrounding this year’s Best Picture nominees is currently dominating the Oscar Twitter conversation, accounting for 33,742 total posts. And while the merits of each nominee are still being fiercely debated, the common consensus appears to be “The Shape of Water”. Based on our panel of tweets, 21% agree that this year’s Best Picture will be taking the form of The Shape of Water.
Following suit, the award for Best Director as predicted by our trusty tweeters will be going to the director of “The Shape of Water”, Guillermo del Toro. Of the nearly 24,000 posts related to Best Director, 30% were harping on the direction by del Toro for “The Shape of Water”. Our Twitter audience clearly has a lot of confidence in this feature film, which only bolsters our predictions (The Shape of… Oscar Winner?).
And we still aren’t breaking from the pack yet. The award for Best Original Screenplay is predicted to go to, you guessed it, “The Shape of Water”. With 39% of the over 19,000 posts in this category naming “The Shape of Water” as the winner, perhaps this prediction will prove to be more solid than its namesake.
Finally, on to the Twitter predictions for Best Actor and Actress– the two Academy Award classics. Not surprisingly, a significant amount of the Oscar Twitter conversation is in relation to these two categories (29,014 total posts for Best Actor and 18,185 posts for Best Actress). Our self-claimed Twitter movie critiques appear to be blown away by the acting of the young star Timothée Chalamet in the emotional and thematically dense film “Call Me by Your Name”– a whopping 48% predict him to end Sunday night as an Oscar recipient.
The predictions for Best Actress, however, were not nearly as cut and dry. This year’s nominees each performed incredibly in their respective roles, making predictions difficult. However, the pack leader on Twitter is currently Margot Robbie for her role in “I, Tonya”, with 20% of posts tipping the hat in her favor. Perhaps this prediction is because of the Twitter-sphere’s love for this pop-culture icon (who could forget her iconic role in “The Wolf of Wall Street”?). But as with each of these predictions, only time will tell the true from the Oscar hopefuls.
Post contributed by SEE Suite Intern Carly Wages.
