Matt's Blog

We’re not far away from the Academy Awards – less than 3 weeks remain.  I haven’t updated you with my thoughts on the race for a while but it’s certainly shifted back in Argo’s favour.  Argo has produced a clean sweep of the 4 big lead up awards – the Golden Globe (drama), the Screen Actors Guild Award for best ensemble, the Directors Guild Award (Ben Affleck) and the Producers Guild Award.  It was fading in betting markets but this string of wins has brought it into near-favouritism alongside Lincoln.  It looks like a two-horse race but anything is possible.

There’s one fact I can’t get past though.  Of all the lead up awards, there’s ONE that you pay attention to more than any other – the Directors Guild Award.  It was first awarded in 1949 and has been handed out 65 times.  On only 6 occasions has the winner of the award not gone on and won the Academy Award.  That’s a ridiculous correlation!  We’re talking 92%!  The last time the awards didn’t match up was in 2002 when Rob Marshall won the Guild Award for Chicago but lost the Oscar to Roman Polanski for The Pianist (a huge boil over).

So with Ben Affleck winning the Directors Guild Award, you’d think he’d be a short priced favourite to win the Oscar, right?  His odds should be around $1.10, right?  Wrong.  You can get whatever odds you want… because Affleck isn’t even nominated!  I was certainly puzzled when the nominations came out but the fact that Argo has won all the major lead up awards over the past 2 weeks makes it even stranger.  How is there so much love for the film in Hollywood and yet the Academy doesn’t think him worthy as one of the five nominees?

It’s hard to believe.  Well, at least we know that the streak will be broken.  After this year, there’ll be 7 people who have won the Directors Guild Award and not gone on to win the Oscar.  Affleck may yet have the last laugh if the film wins best picture (since he’s a producer and will get to take home an Oscar statue anyway) but it’s a curious twist in an odd year for Oscar predictions.