With so many newcomers on the Oscar Nom's list this year, we here at Nanocrowd were wondering which established stars have been overlooked and are overdue to win an Oscar. We also thought that the best people to answer this question would be the movie viewers who have left millions of movie reviews on the web. We added a few new enhancements to our Reaction Mapping™ technology and did a statistical analysis of movie viewers' reactions to the films of over 8,000 starring actors and directors with the goal of finding out which stars' body of work should put them in the hunt for an Academy Award.
Our analysis of all these actors' and directors' work suggested that many of the stars who are mathematically most likely to win an Oscar have actually never won. Artists like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Robin Wright Penn, and Julianne Moore inspired us to create a "Most Overdue for an Oscar" list. This list is a striking contrast to the 2010 Oscar Nomination list that is crowded with budding talent like Anna Kendrick, Carey Muligan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeremy Renner and emerging character actors like Christoph Waltz.
Overdue Actors
According to this analysis, several actors and directors are mathematically way overdue for an academy award.
Most Overdue Actors
In the chart above, we show the top 10 "Overdue Actors." The scale at the bottom shows the weighted "Should-win" score for each actor.
To get to this score, we first calculate the likelihood that each of over 6,000 actors (who have starred in at least 2 popular movies) will win an Oscar. Then we calculate the average of all of those values. To get a "Should-win" score for each actor, we calculate a percentage score representing how much above or below the average each actor is. Finally we remove all the actors who have already won an Oscar.
Overdue Actresses
Among the top Overdue Actresses shown below, Robin Wright Penn is clearly the most overdue for an acting Oscar. The rest of the list has some expected and some surprising members. Remember that these are not Nanocrowd's picks, but the sum of the reactions of thousands of viewers to these actress' movies.
Most Overdue Actresses
Overdue Directors
The same calculation can be done for directors, and although the directors were a very close call, Alan Parker wins the coveted "Most Overdue Director" award for 2010 in a photo finish with Ridley Scott. Although Parker is certainly not as prolific or well-known as some of the others on the overlooked list, clearly his movies struck a chord with viewers.
Most Overdue Directors
How did we calculate these lists?
There are four steps to getting to the list above. First, we calculated the Reaction Map for all of the movies in three categories: Academy Award winners 2000-2009, Academy Award nominees 2005-2009, and Academy Award nominees 2000-2004. A Reaction Map is a mathematical abstraction of all the reactions to an object like a movie or a collection of movies.
Then we compared these three Reaction Maps to the Reaction Maps of each of over 8,000 actors and directors to see which of those artists body of work elicited similar reactions to the movies in each of our 3 Academy Award movie groups.
Third, for our overall "Should-win" score, we took a weighted average of the three comparisons and then calculated if each artist's score was above or below average. This above-average score becomes that actor's "Should-win score."
Finally, we remove anyone who has already won an acting or directing Oscar.
We thought you might want to see the Should-win scores for all of the top artists, whether or not they have already received an Oscar. Below are the 10 actors who were calculated as most "Deserving" to win an Oscar, based on viewer comments. This list includes actors who have already won an acting Academy Award alongside those that haven't.
Several of the people on this list have already won an Oscar (they are the actors with the green bars), while the actors with the blue bars are calculated to be Deserving of an award, but have never won one.
Most Deserving Actors
Below are the Should-win scores for actresses. You can see that Robin Wright Penn leads the Deserving field overall, even though she has no wins. That is why she ended up as the clear top of the Overdue Actresses list. Nicole Kidman, Kate Blanchet, and Kate Winslet, but are not on the Overdue list.
Most Deserving Actresses
As a final example of our calculations, below is the list of most Deserving directors. Again, you can see that our list of deserving directors includes a good mix of past winners (Coppola, Scorsese, and Eastwood sure seem deserving!) as well as the first of our "Overdue" directors.
Most Deserving Directors
If Boxoffice results are any clue, some recent releases suggest that in 2011 the Academy might honor some of these Overdue artists. Last weekend saw Shutter Island hold on to the top box office spot for the second week in a row. The psychological thriller marks the fourth teeming of Martin Scorsese (our #2 director who has already won an Oscar) and Leonardo DiCaprio (our #1 Overdue actor). We'll see...
Just in case this isn't enough data for you, below are the top 20 Most Overdue artists in each category.
Top 20 Most Overdue Actors
1. Leonardo DiCaprio
2. Joaquin Phoenix
3. Christian Bale
4. Richard Gere
5. Ed Harris
6. Johnny Depp
7. Ewan McGregor
8. Edward Norton
9. John Malkovich
10. Colin Farrell
11. Brad Pitt
12. Bob Hoskins
13. Harvey Keitel
14. Laurence Fishburne
15. Nick Nolte
16. Samuel L. Jackson
17. John Travolta
18. David Morse
19. Jeff Bridges
20. Liam Neeson
Top 20 Most Overdue Actresses
1. Robin Wright Penn
2. Maria Bello
3. Julianne Moore
4. Michelle Pfeiffer
5. Claire Danes
6. Jennifer Lopez
7. Joan Allen
8. Natalie Portman
9. Diane Lane
10. Laura Linney
11. Naomi Watts
12. Uma Thurman
13. Glenn Close
14. Kate Beckinsale
15. Jennifer Jason Leigh
16. Annette Bening
17. Scarlett Johansson
18. Helena Bonham Carter
19. Keira Knightley
20. Deborah Kara Unger
Top 20 Most Overdue Directors
1. Alan Parker
2. Ridley Scott
3. Sidney Lumet
4. Gus Van Sant
5. Michael Mann
6. Joel Schumacher
7. Marc Forster
8. James Mangold
9. Brian De Palma
10. Spike Lee
11. Alfonso Cuaron
12. Paul Thomas Anderson
13. Neil Jordan
14. Norman Jewison
15. David Lynch
16. Robert Altman
17. Taylor Hackford
18. Richard Fleischer
19. David Fincher
20. Sean Penn
posted by Roderic March
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