Million dollar heist ... Photograph: Carlo
Allegri/Getty Images
Spring is (not quite) springing, and the stars are singing - well the ones in Walk the Line are anyway - and, yes, it's time to get overexcited about the fate of a small number of glum-looking statuettes, writes Guy Dammann.
The announcement of the Golden Globes this morning has fired the cinematic start gun for the Oscars race, even though the nominations won't be announced for a few weeks. Moreover, it has prompted us to relaunch our unique, patented and quite simply infallible Oscars predictor.
"Infallible?" you ask. Surely last year's prediction was wrong. Well, for one thing, I don't see why we can't use the same rather weak riposte about exceptions proving rules that everyone else always relies upon. But, the facts of the matter aside, surely it was the judges who got it wrong, not us? Million Dollar Baby? Billion dollar mistake, more like, as the judges clearly messed around with their version of the spreadsheet.
This year's panel can make amends. Currently, our piece of advanced secret software engineering is gunning for those chaps in chaps on Brokeback Mountain. But it's early days, and we'll need several more sets of results from forthcoming Oscar warm-ups before we can be 100% certain, and you, of course, can clean up at the bookies.
We'll keep you posted on the latest ruminations of our appliance of science, of course, but if you want to try the predictor out for yourselves, you can download it here. It comes as a spreadsheet pre-filled with the data for the last six years, including the nominees who didn't win. There's a space for you to test the predictor at the top of each year. Simply type in the name of a film from that year and you will see how many predictor points it would have scored.
