Fun Facts and Stats From Our 2013 Oscar Pool

Best Actors: DDL, Jennifer Lawrence
Best Supporting: Anne and Christoph

Marathon movie-watching days, internet articles about the indecipherable politics of the Academy, coffee shop chats about amazing films that were totally overlooked (The Impossible - just sayin').

If you're a mega movie nerd (like me), you need one more day to ease out of Oscar season, and this post is for you.

I've already been online and read the panoply of opinions about Seth McFarlane's performance as host (and apparent offender of some, but not all, women). Now, it's time to nerd out with fun facts from our online Oscar pool.

We didn't totally suck. On the whole, our contest participants did pretty well. If you look at our majority picks, we nailed the winners in seven of nine categories. The two categories we blew were "Best Director" ( 67% of us picked Spielberg, not Ang Lee) and "Best Supporting Actor".

We whiffed on Christoph Waltz. "Best Supporting Actor" was far and away our worst showing. Though a handful of people picked Waltz, as a group we awarded him the least votes in the category, apparently expecting a win from someone in the tried-and-true crowd.

We weren't fooled on Best Picture. Of the nine Best Pic nominees, only three received any of our votes at all.  Some expected Lincoln to sneak the win, and a few thought Silver Linings might pull a major upset, but 76.5% of us correctly picked Argo as the winner.

Optimism usually pays, but not this time. Most of us (foolishly?) expected the Oscar broadcast to run close to its 180 minute time slot on ABC. In our Oscar pool, 92% of participants underestimated the actual length of the broadcast, although one person pegged it exactly. (You killed in the tiebreaker, Beth Peery, now if you could only pick the categories right!)

• Our average guess for the length of show was 190 minutes.
• The actual broadcast ran 215 minutes from opening through the final credits - a whopping 35 minutes over the scheduled time.

Contest math is not for sissies. The spreadsheet I created to track and calculate contest results involved 24 columns of data, 11 different Excel formulas, and one reassuring technical call to Jane Regenstreif.

Overall, I loved this year's crop of Oscar films, and I had a great time putting together the contest. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

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