Predicted Oscar Winners - 2009

The Numbers' annual Oscar polls have proved to be remarkably accurate predictors of the final results on Oscar night. We call results based on the hundreds of The Numbers readers who vote in our Predict the Oscars competition.

We've received all the votes now, and are ready to make predictions in all categories. Percentage figures are the percentage of The Numbers readers who believe a movie or performance will win. They are a rough guide to how likely a particular movie is to win in a category - for example, we're pretty certain WALL-E will win Best Animated Feature.

The big winner looks as though it will be Slumdog Millionaire, which is a big favorite for Best Picture and for which Danny Boyle is an overwhelming favorite for the Best Directing Oscar. It's also favored in five other categories: Adapted Screenplay, Song and Score, Film Editing and Cinematography. That could give it seven wins on the night -- comfortably the best among all films.

Two movies are predicted to pick up three Oscars. Heath Ledger is an overwhelming favorite for Best Supporting Actor, and The Dark Knight is also expected to win for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is favored for Visual Effects, Make-up and Art Direction.

The two closest races among the major awards are Best Actor in a Leading Role and Actress in a Supporting Role. In the former, Mickey Rourke (56.7%) is seen as having the edge over Sean Penn (33.4%). In the latter, Penelope Cruz garners just over half the vote (56.2%), with the rest of the votes evenly split between the other four nominees. Viola Davis is actually in second place with just 12.1% of the vote.

The most remarkable feature of this year's vote is that the favorite scores over 50% of the vote in all but one of the categories (and the odd-category-out is "Short Film (Live Action)", which is nearly always very hard to predict). That's by far the highest level of confidence we've seen across the board in all the years we've been running the contest. There are likely to be some surprises on the night, but our readers seem to agree strongly on who the favorites are.

- Click here to see the complete vote tallies in each category
- Click here to see the actual winners on the night

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