From the archives: does the best picture win?

Oscar Mike

The nominations for this year's Academy Awards are out, with Steven Spielberg's Lincoln leading the way with 12. This put me in mind of a couple of articles I wrote for Significance back in 2011 looking at how well critics' reviews predict which movies walk away with the coveted Oscar for Best Picture. I focused my attentions on Metacritic, the review aggregator site that would hopefully provide the best snapshot of what all the 'experts' thought of each nominated film.

It turned out that average review scores weren't particularly good at predicting the best picture, with just five 'Metacritic favourites' winning in the 18-year period I investigated. Since then, this number has crept up: while the 2011 winner The King's Speech was a mere fourth favourite, last year The Artist became the sixth top-rated movie to actually win.

This year, spy thriller Zero Dark Thirty leads the field, with a Metacritic score of 95. Best Foreign Language nominee Amour is a close second on 93, with a (relatively) big drop down to 86 where three films are lurking in third place. However, it's one of these three - the aforementioned Lincoln - which is currently the runaway favourite with the bookmakers.

It seems, then, that the stage is set for another non-'favourite' to take the top prize. However, should the bookies be proved correct, the makers of Zero Dark Thirty can at least console themselves with this fact: with a Metacritic score of 95 it will become the 'best' losing picture in the last 20 years.

From the archives: goalfest in the Premier League

Yesterday evening saw one of the highest scoring English Premier League matches of all time. Arsenal's 7-3 drubbing of Newcastle joins just three other 10-goal games, although Portsmouth's 7-4 victory over Reading in 2007 remains the outright claimant for this particular accolade.

This was just one part, however, of a Saturday chock-full of goals, with a total of 35 scored across the eight matches played. This put me in mind of an article I wrote for Significance early in 2011 about an even more extraordinary day of football. Back then, Arsenal and Newcastle were at it again, with the latter's stunning four-goal comeback contributing to a whopping 41 scored across that day's eight Premier League games. In the article I used this as an excuse to show off the Poisson distribution, demonstrating how goals scored in football matches can be modeled surprisingly well by what is ultimately a (fairly simple) mathematical formula.

The remaining two matches of that particular weekend of football only produced two more goals, bringing the total for a complete 10 match 'round' of Premier League fixtures to 43. Based on the Poisson distribution (and assuming an average of 2.6 goals per game) I estimated there was a roughly 1 in 720 chance of seeing at least that many goals in a set of 10 games. This weekend's football was almost - but not quite - as remarkable, with six goals today bringing us to a total of 41 across 10 matches. Based on the same theory, this works out to a 1 in 250 occurrence.