Last week we spent some time discussing and tracking the 82nd Academy Awards. Now that the winners have their Oscars, and the smoke has cleared, we can stand back and look at our own study in social media discussion.

Let’s do a quick recap – Last Tuesday we asked “Can online monitoring predict the Oscars?“, a question we set out to answer by tracking the top three contenders for Best Picture: box office powerhouse Avatar, fan-favorite Inglourious Basterds, and critical darling The Hurt Locker (which just so happened to be this humble author’s favorite film of the year).

Specifically we wanted to see if online discussion could in any way act as a predictor towards who would walk away with that oh-so-coveted little gold man.

Throughout the week, a consistent trend occurred with Avatar leading, The Hurt Locker usually about 11-15% behind, and Inglourious Basterds typically another 3% behind The Hurt Locker.

Was there was a direct correlation between online chatter about three Best Picture candidates and those movies’ chances of winning the big prize at the Oscars Sunday night?

The short answer: not exactly.

In February, I predicted on my own that The Hurt Locker would win Best Picture in a YouTube video for my movie site. It was kind of a no-brainer. But I was curious to see what overall volume would show us.

Avatar had 42% of all online Best Picture discussion among the top three contenders (not surprising since its the highest grossing movie of all time), but it came up short Sunday night.

The Academy is a closed voting body and clearly online buzz didn’t affect their voting to the point of predicting the correct winner. That said, Avatar’s loss Sunday night does illustrate the need to look at social media from the perspective of how it fits with outside datasets, and not merely as a stand-alone source.

In this case, maybe combining picks from industry analysts and movie critics (who championed underdog winner The Hurt Locker since its release last July) with the online data could have bolstered The Hurt Locker’s position. Among those groups, The Hurt Locker was the clear favorite.

Some other takeaways:

Semantically, The Hurt Locker had a very solid presence, even beating out Avatar in the Inglourious Basterds insight.

To wrap-up: This recent Twitter study from NMS also bears out the notion that Avatar was clearly the most discussed film online. In that respect, our study was a success.

While online samplings didn’t predict the Best Picture winner, they are certainly valuable in finding out all kinds of other metrics. After all, isn’t the Oscar supposed to be about artistic merit and not popularity?

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:

I’ve been writing about Spiral16’s ongoing 2010 Oscar study this week. We are measuring the power of online buzz about the Academy Awards and by Sunday night, we’ll know if the amount of online chatter for the top three contenders had any connection to the ceremony’s Best Picture winner.

Two things about the way Spark is collecting data:

Avatar is currently in the overall lead, so the graphic to the right represents the site type breakdown for URLs mentioning Avatar and “best picture.”

Below, however, we’ll combine the stats for all three movies and view the study as a whole.

This is how the breakdown of sites looks so far for frontrunners Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds It’s actually very similar to the Avatar study:

Also, it’s important to mention that each of these samplings are being done independently of each other. This means that if Avatar is mentioned in the same post as The Hurt Locker, that URL will be accepted as a relevant result in the individual studies for each movie. That way, one film is not able to “steal any votes” away from another.

To illustrate just how widely spread out Oscar talk is all over the web, take a look at our 3D visual map of the Avatar study. The spheres represent URLs and the lines are links between them.

Green spheres have an average of positive sentiment, red are average negative, and gray are URLs with an average neutral sentiment.

This is a visual illustration of how many websites have Oscar talk related to these movies and how they all are fairly disconnected to each other. To explore a working Spark 3D Virtualization for yourself and see what this is really like, click here.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at sentiment—some specific overt stuff and how sentiment relates to the big picture.

In yesterday’s blog, I went into detail about how we set up our 2010 Oscar prediction study. Using Spiral16’s Internet monitoring tool Spark, we aim to find out if there is any correlation between online chatter about the top three Best Picture candidates and the result of Sunday night’s awards ceremony.

The overall percentage for each of the movies hasn’t changed that much since yesterday. Remember, the URLs deemed relevant for this study are only the ones that also mention “best picture.”

Now let’s look at how the results differ in the three separate searches related to each movie. Looking at the Semantic Cloud, you can get a good idea of the language people that are using when writing about the Best Picture race. Although Inglourious Basterds has only 7% less of the share of conversation overall, it’s status as a distant third place is solidified by looking at the total count of words used.

Looking at this, it’s pretty clear that Basterds is running a distant third. It should also be noted that no other nominated movies’ keywords (Precious, Up, Up in the Air, The Blind Side, etc.) showed up before Basterds, further solidifying its place as the odds-on unrewarded bronze medalist .

It’s also worth mentioning that The Hurt Locker has such a solid presence in the word cloud overall.

Other interesting sidenotes:

In all three studies, “oscar” outranks “academy” and “awards,” while “oscars” is right behind them.

This is no big surprise to learn that people are using the slang terminology more than the official title of the ceremony.

With another search today, I also confirmed my suspicions from yesterday with data from Spark. I contended that:

Using two different queries, one for “inglourious basterds” and one for the more subtly misspelled title “inglorious basterds,” I discovered that 46% of all people referencing the film spelled it wrong like Neilsen did. This means their study didn’t pick up a whopping 55% of the traffic that spelled the film’s title right.

We’ll have more data insight tomorrow, so stay tuned.

With the Best Picture category at this year’s Academy Awards expanding to 10 nominees, this year’s race may be the least predictable in recent memory.

Or not.

Nobody really knows, since it is more than just the number of nominees that has changed. The Oscars are also employing a tiered voting system where Academy members rank the 10 films from best to worst and the scores determine the winner.

Even though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are the only ones whose votes actually count, I thought I’d take a look at the amount of online chatter about some of the nominees to see if there is any correlation between the movies people are talking about and the end result of the Academy’s voting.

Using Spiral16’s Internet monitoring platform Spark, I started tracking posts about the two movies that are generally considered to be the frontrunners—Avatar and The Hurt Locker—and the film that many say could be the spoiler: Inglourious Basterds.

Remember, Spark is not limited to merely social media sites. Also, because Spark is not limited to RSS-generated results, it pulls in a huge amount of data.

On Monday, I posted about setting up good search terms to get great results. This is absolutely key. For this study, I searched the title of each film and the words “best picture” to see only the posts that were equating the two in some fashion.

For The Hurt Locker, I left out the word “the” and for Inglourious Basterds, I searched for both “inglourious” and “inglorious,” knowing that everybody will catch the obvious misspelling of “bastards” in the film’s title, but might miss the more subtle misspelling of “inglorious.”

(The Nielsen Company, in a post from yesterday, appears to have made a major goof in their flawed Best Picture study. Not only did Inglourious Basterds come in last in terms of total buzz—not a chance that is accurate—but in their data chart, the movie is spelled incorrectly as well. Guess we know why it came in last! I’m also wondering how they solved the Up/Up in the Air problem, but that’s another story.)

Thankful that they are not considered to be in the top three, I purposefully ignored nominees Up and Up in the Air because differentiating the two would be nearly impossible and lead to a lot of bad data. (You can add “Pixar” as a search term for Up, but how many people are actually mentioning the studio when they talk about the movie’s Best Picture chances? 50 percent? 40?)

I set the date range to bring in results going back to Feb. 10, the day the ballots were mailed to members of the Academy. Hopefully, this brings back a total that is more relevant to the actual vote, as it reflects the online culture during the time when voters will be making up their minds.

Here is the big-picture Best Picture overview as of noon CST today:

Below are some random snippets that bear out some of the bigger themes of this race.

Although Avatar is the most talked about so far, it also is the film that’s been seen by the most people. That means we have to assume that not all the conversation surrounding the Best Picture race is about how it’s going to win. (Check out the very first conversation excerpt.)

Inglourious Basterds’ spoiler chances are a popular topic, as you can see by the snippets in the third box below.

Come back tomorrow for more interesting data in our 2010 Best Picture race case study. After the Oscar telecast on Monday night, we’ll know if there’s any connection between online chatter and who wins the big prize.