Keep Losing Your Oscar Pool? The Fool-Proof Way to Win

It has not been fully appreciated how deliciously ironic—and yet how appropriate—two of this year's Oscar nominations are. The first is, of course, Kate Winslet's sixth nomination, for her role in Nazi drama "The Reader," which comes after her send-up of the Academy's Holocaust obsession on BBC show "Extras." And the second is Robert Downey Jr.'s supporting nomination for his "Tropic Thunder" turn, a role that was intended to lampoon the robotic way Oscar gets doled out.

But if the Academy is so gosh-darn predictable, to the point of being able to laugh at, and simultaneously confirm, its own predictability, then why did I lose my Oscar pool last year?

Because I was operating on some fallacious logic, that's why. During early February, the movie buff's equivalent of March Madness, theories about how to game your Oscar pool run rampant: the Academy never picks comedies, an actor playing a character with a disability will win, Holocaust movies are a sure thing ("Never bet against the Jews," as my aunt put it), nominees listed first on the ballot have a better chance. By the conventional wisdom, a perfect Best Picture lock might be something like a three-hour, $100 million-earning drama, directed by a big name and starring grizzled, veteran actors in WWII-era Berlin.

That might sound like "Valkyrie," but there's a reason the Tom Cruise drama isn't up for a statuette: the conventional wisdom on the Academy is wrong. The real, tried-and-true way to game the system involves calculating the weight of the Golden Globes and guild wins, those awards given out by the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America.

Statistics professor Iain Pardoe, of the University of Oregon, has written extensively on a mathematical model he's used to generate odds before the show, measuring down to the tenth of a percent the chance that a movie, actor or director will win. Going back through Oscar history, he created a formula based on guild wins, Golden Globe wins, previous Oscar nominations and previous Oscar wins, the best predictive factors. Sorry, placement on the ballot has little predictive power. Pardoe calls the common belief among aficionados that the first nominee in a category has a better chance of winning than those lower in the list a "seemingly systematic pattern that is probably just chance variation." (Aside from his degree and blog about the history of Oscar predicting, Pardoe's also got the credentialing power of victory: he was a winner at his local video store last year. "I can't remember how many free rentals I got, but it was quite nice to win," he says.)

By Pardoe's measurements, "Slumdog Millionaire" leads the Best Picture pack, with a 60 percent chance of winning, despite its lack of professional actors, a big budget or an I'm-on-suicide-watch ending. His other picks: Kate Winslet will take the Best Actress statue (a near lock at 92 percent); "Slumdog" director Danny Boyle will win for directing (an 81 percent chance); and Sean Penn, not Globe winner Mickey Rourke, will take the top actor award (with a 42 percent chance of winning).

Yes, it's number-crunchy and nerdy—a slightly staid, less thrilling way to cinch whatever kitty your pool puts up. But who among us couldn't use some (almost) guaranteed prize money this year?