Jack and Diddly

SOMETHING I WROTE FOR WORK: So, how did it go?

LINKS: Is this the 84th Academy Awards I see before me?

The title of this post is an incomplete and probably unjustly barbed list of all of the things that I know about predicting the winners of the Academy Awards. I mean, I do know more than the Average Joe. I used to make my guesses only in the major Oscar categories, and I used to recruit suckers fellow film enthusiasts to print their names in the Daily Herald and compete against me, head-to-head. I'm pretty sure that I never lost, over a period of about six years, though I may have been tied one year. Then a couple of years ago, I got tired of rounding up other people's guesses and just ran my own, expanding the outlook to include every award announced during the live telecast: all 24 of them. It's harder to look smart, but it's kind of fun to toe the line and predict every stinkin' category. Including the ones where my knowledge of the nominees amounts to Jack and you-know-what.

This was my second year of picking the entire field, and I upped my game a little, improving by three total picks to top .500 for the first time. Last year I made 11 correct predictions, this year it was 14. I had one last-minute change-of-heart go against me: I originally had the high school football movie Undefeated correctly pegged to win Best Documentary Feature, before switching to Paradise Lost 3 right before deadline. I guess you should never bet against something called Undefeated. A couple of other last-minute switches worked in my favor, like changing my Best Makeup winner from Albert Nobbs to The Iron Lady. I had a little too much faith in The Artist, and not nearly enough faith in Hugo. Or in Meryl Streep, though at least I'm in that boat with every other Academy Awards predictor on the planet. I even went to so far as to suggest that both Michelle Williams and Glenn Close were better "upset" picks than Streep.

Live and learn. I'm sure I'll nail all 24 of them next year. Click the link at the top of this post and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to see exactly how I fared.