If online buzz amounts to anything in this year’s Oscar race, James Cameron’s Avatar will win Best Picture on Sunday night.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is obviously a closed voting body, but they are influenced by the media just like everybody else. The study started on Feb. 10, the day ballots were mailed to members of the Academy.
Using Spiral16’s online listening platform Spark, we tracked the top three contenders for Best Picture this year: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds.
This kind of measurement only takes into consideration volume and not the sentiment of the collected URLs. Unsurprisingly, a huge majority of all of the sentiment surrounding all three movies is positive.
Spark has two sentiment scoring capabilities.
The first is an average score based on all the words on the page and the second automatically extracts the most positive and negative passages.
Among the overt sentiment samples, all three movies have a higher than 97% positive rating. This means that of the loud voices on the Internet, the positive ones far outweigh the negative.
When URLs are scored for an average amount of sentiment, Inglourious Basterds leads the pack, with a 79% positive rating. Avatar is second with 74%, and The Hurt Locker is third with 71%.
Could it be that the multiple last-minute controversies surrounding The Hurt Locker are affecting its overall sentiment score? Is Basterds poised to play spoiler, riding a wave of positive sentiment, and challenge Avatar?
We’ll find out Sunday night! Stay tuned Monday for our Oscar report wrap-up.
Below are some random sentiment excerpts from the study. Click for a larger image:
