Our Social Awards Season App Gears up for the Oscars

We’re a week away from the biggest night in Hollywood, and our DataViz, a collaboration between The Credits and global social analytics and monitoring firm Brandwatch, a truly one-of-a-kind Social Awards App, is proving its mettle for the second year in a row. The DataViz tracked, crunched and analyzed how critics and the public predicted who would the various categories in the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Golden Globes, Producers Guild of American Awards and Directors Guild of America Awards, creating percentages for each category and nominee. This is the only predictive model of its kind in the world, sifting through millions of award-related mentions from Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, as well as news outlets like The Hollywood Reporter and popular film blogs and forums. To give you a sense of just how much data is out there to sift through, consider what Brandwatch's quantitative analyst, Edward Cook, told us—90% of all data in the world is less than two years old. "When we capture this data, analyze and interpret it, we unlock an unmatched source of insight," Cook says.

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And now that the final (and biggest) award show of the season is nigh, the DataViz will soon reveal just how accurate movie lovers and critics alike are at predicting award season winners having looked at five major awards ceremonies, and, perhaps, shed a light on any divergence between the bodies that select the winners and the general public and critics who weigh in. The DataViz's aim is not solely to be the best awards season predictive model."The project aims to show which films fans would vote, were they given the chance," Cook says, "which allows us to answer pertinent questions: for which awards do critics and the public disagree? Which are the most contested nominees? What do the favorites have in common?" In a sense, the DataViz is learning how the public, critics and award governing bodies view the movies themselves, creating a clearer picture of what kinds of films (and their respective cast and crew) win, and, potentially, why.

A Brief History

When we teamed up with Brandwatch to unveil our first DataViz last year, we were confident it would perform well, but not that well. Of the 18 Oscar categories we tracked last year, the DataViz analyzed the public and critical predictions of who would win and, quantifying that insane amount of data, predicted the correct winner 83% of the time, which was the second most accurate percentage behind Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby according to a round-up created by Slate.

No content to rest on our laurels, Brandwatch and The Credits decided to increase the degree of difficulty by including four more awards ceremonies (including television awards)—a challenge for both the data crunching and the design. A whole bunch of improved technology (including beefing up the search strings—believe us, the particulars require an advanced degree in computer science to understand) has allowed this year’s DataViz to track an incredible amount of information