Oscar Competition Winners

March 13, 2006

This year's Predict the Academy Awards contest had a huge turnout, and in spite of a big surprise Best Picture winner, we had our most competitive race yet. The winners scored a remarkable 21 out of 24 correct predictions.

And our winners were...

John Schweitz of Newark, DE, who predicted pretty much everything right, except for Best Picture. No prizes for guessing which movie he had down for winning the top award.

The secret of his success?

"To make my picks I waited as long as possible which is important because a movie's popularity can rise or fall in a few short weeks and looked at as many different sources as possible, because some are more credible than others. I paid a lot of attention to the pundits and made sure to vote for who I thought was going to win, not who I wanted to win (the Constant Gardener). I saw all of the Oscar contenders in the theater, I love the Oscar style movies that are complex and dealing with serious subject matter. Already looking forward to next year's Oscar race!"

Second place went to Gerald Granozio of Amagansett, NY, who also predicted 21 out of 24 winners, but entered the competition shortly after John. Gerald claims an inside track, having just completed a book about the Oscars, and says his strategy was "to spend a great amount of time surfing all the Oscar websites for precursor input and then see all the movies... finally I try to figure out how the academy will vote based on my many years of experience of second guessing them."

Congratulations to John and Gerald. We'll be contacting the runners-up prize winners in the next few days.