Predicted Oscar Winners - 2010

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, Avatar looks virtually certain to win the Visual Effects award.

In fact, Avatar looks set to win the most Oscars tonight by a fairly comfortable margin. It leads in six categories, including five of the technical categories. No other film comes close in terms of expected Oscars. The Hurt Locker is predicted to pick up two awards -- one for Kathryn Bigelow for directing and one for Film Editing -- although it's a very close second in two other categories (more on that in a moment). Inglourious Basterds is also the pick in two categories, with Original Screenplay and Christoph Waltz' supporting actor award its favored categories.

All the acting awards have big favorites. Jeff Bridges got 88% of the votes for Best Actor, Waltz received 87% for Best Supporting Actor, and Mo'Nique was the choice of 85% of voters for Best Supporting Actress. The one area where some entrants thought we might be in for a surprise was the Best Actress category, where Sandra Bullock is still a big favorite, but 25% of voters picked one of the other contenders (Meryl Streep coming out top among them, but with only 11% of the vote).

For the big non-acting awards, two races look to have big favorites, and two are looking extremely close. Up in the Air gets 67% of the votes for Best Adapted Screenplay, while Up has a 93% share for Best Animated Feature, second only to Avatar's lock on the Visual Effects award among tonight's certainties.

The two real toss-up categories, however, include the biggest award of the night. Our readers have Avatar as favorite for Best Picture, but since it has only 48% of the vote, one could reasonably say that the majority of readers think that something else will win. The Hurt Locker is just 13 votes behind Avatar in the final tally, and really this race looks like a coin flip. No other movie gets more than a handful of votes.

If you're looking for an early indication of which movie is destined for Best Picture, the Best Original Screenplay category is the one to watch. Again our readers put this as a toss-up, with Inglourious Basterds the favorite, but with barely 50% of the votes. The Hurt Locker is once more ranked number two by readers with 40% of the votes.

Right now, we would peg Avatar as the marginal favorite for Best Picture, but if The Hurt Locker picks up the award for Original Screenplay, it becomes the more likely winner, we believe.

- Click here to see the complete vote tallies in each category

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