And the Oscar goes to… *cough*
(Photo: Apple TV)
In the aftermath of the 2022 Oscars, let’s talk about some interesting facts about this year’s winners: how Timothee Chalamet’s coughs in Dune made them statistically likely to win, and how CODA beat all odds– including those related to coughing.
May the Cough-iest Win
In the run up to this year’s Academy Awards, the brilliant minds at the Pudding are proposing a novel way of predicting winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture with 91.7% accuracy: counting coughs and sneezes.
Through a hilarious visual essay styled to purposefully mimic a legitimate academic study, The Pudding broke down the data on coughs, sneezes, and Oscar winners.
Remarking on the ridiculousness of their hypothesis, the introduction to the visual essay reads: “While some may call our methods “tenuous at best” and our dataset “noise whose analysis represents only a brazen waste of department resources,” we believe that by leveraging our years of research, we can establish a revolutionary prediction model.”
The model started with The Pudding analyzing data from more than 30,000 films to create a database aptly named Every Movie Cough. Upon doing so, they came to a sudden and startling realization that films that include coughs and sneezes are more likely to be nominated for Best Picture. The Pudding noted that too few or too many coughs would not make for a winner— it has to be just the right amount of coughs.
Despite betting markets and industry journalists placing their bets on the other nominees, The Pudding predicted that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune would take the Best Picture prize. Based on The Pudding’s model, Timothee Chalamet’s extraordinary talents in coughing the perfect number of times should have landed them the award– but alas, this time, The Pudding’s model failed them.
Beating the odds (without a single cough)
CODA’s Oscars win not only made history for the Deaf community, it was also the first film released by a streaming service (Apple TV+) to win Best Picture. The win was unprecedented, as early predictions pegged The Power of Dog and Belfast as frontrunners for the award.
CODA’s win wasn’t just a surprise based on industry experts’ predictions; one look at the numbers will tell you why CODA was not in the early predictions for Best Picture wins.
According to data from Parrot Analytics, while CODA was 14.2 times more popular than the average film in the US, it was still the second least in-demand Best Picture nominee. CODA’s popularity among the general audience paled in comparison to Dune, The Power of Dog, and even Universal Pictures’ Licorice Pizza.
However, as evidenced by Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture win with Parasite in 2020, popularity isn’t necessarily correlated with a film’s chances at winning Best Picture. And, evidently, neither is the number of coughs and sneezes. Sorry, Timothee Chalamet.
