And the Oscar guessing went to...

Following up on the earlier post from the "Things that were more interesting a couple weeks ago but I'm only getting around to mentioning now because... hey, it's not like I'm getting paid to do this and get off my back--oh, sorry about that. Please come back. Really, I'm sorry. I'm not upset with you" department:

The way my fiancée and I do our Oscar pool is not a pool, as there's no pot to win (other than bragging rights), but a straightforward contest. Unlike the office pools, which more or less require one's picks be made well in advance of the telecast, we have literally up until the moment the presenter says "And the Oscar goes to…" to throw our support behind a given nominee. There's no requirement to pick all ahead of time. About the only structure we impose is keeping our choices hidden from the other until after the winner is revealed.

This changes the dynamic of the selections versus the all-ahead-of-time format in that it allows for analyzing how earlier awards given may influence still-to-come awards; e.g., we can look at if a particular movie won a "lesser" category and speculate it indicates the voters threw it that bone (so to speak) and that it won't winner the more prestigious category in which it is also nominated. That kind of thinking typically backfires on me, of course, but our system allows for getting backfired by it. It also allows for noticing trends early on and choosing to jump on the bandwagon later. I did quite well a few years ago by deciding to ride Lord of the Rings like an elf on a steed and select it in every category in which it was nominated.

In short, it allows for maximum caprice in the selections. This can come in particularly handy when, as happened this year, I found myself down by two with only three awards left to hand out. To end up with a higher total I'd need to not only get the last three correct but they'd have to also be surprise winners; if I went with the favorites (which I figured she went with), the best I'd do is end up coasting into a score that would be three higher but still two behind her. Victory favors the bold, and perhaps on occasion, the desperate.

So our contest took on the added element of not merely anticipating what a bunch of Academy voters preferred but which they did that the other one wouldn't think they would. As though it wasn't already enough of a challenge.

Okay, really the way it works is we listen to the nominees be announced, perhaps see a snippet of the film and/or get a glimpse of them in the audience, and go with whatever our gut tells us. Unless we had a specific idea ahead of time (i.e., where Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem were involved). And on several occasions we changed our minds at the last second because we thought what our gut picked was too unlikely only to have that prove imprudent when what our gut picked gets announced.

It's a surprisingly rich experience, this pick-as-it-goes method, now that I think about it. No wonder we keep doing it every year.

And for the curious: Yes, I lost by two this year. Primarily that was because after The Bourne Whatever-It-Was won its first technical award I held no confidence that it would win the other two technical categories, unlike my fiancée who knew when to jump on that bandwagon.

Sometimes it's tricky to follow one's own strategies.

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I should note for the record that I participated in no Super Bowl pool back when that was happening.

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I suppose I should further note that of the five films nominated for Best Picture, we did see four of them (all but Michael Clayton). We weren't exactly shooting in the dark. And sometimes that backfires, because we must dismiss our personal preferences to try to anticipate the preferences of strangers. Knowledge is not always power.

Although this year we did jump on the No Country bandwagon.