Oscar Roundup

Fosco didn't watch the Oscars (with one brief exception, as you'll see). But he did keep track of the developments via two live blogs: Ted Gideonse and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com.

First off, let me congratulate the Fosco Lives! reader who correctly predicted the Best Picture winner, Ghetto Superstar, in our first ever Oscar poll. As for the four of you who foolishly voted for Brad Pitt vehicle, The Splendiferous Zeppelin Escapades of Filliam H. Muffman, well, you guys suck.

Speaking of predictions and sucking, it looks like baseball/politics statistics guru Nate Silver was out of his element. The predictions from his logistic regression model were accurate for four of the six categories he predicted. While this is better than chance, it's much worse than the "educated guesses" of insiders like Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger (who got all six correct). Sorry, Nate: your math is powerless against Hollywood.

Fortuitously, the part of the Oscars that Fosco did see was Sean Penn's Best Actor acceptance speech. I loved that he called out the Prop 8 supporters, referring to "the shame in their grandchildren's eyes" when said grandchildren someday learn that their forebears voted for the measure. I thought this rocked.

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