Oscar Thoughts II: Revenge of Oscar Thoughts

* I'm surprised Crash won Best Picture. While it is an interesting movie and cleverly structured, it says nothing profound about race relations in America. Here's the entire movie: racism gets in the way of our natural connections with each other. The movie appears to say much more than it actually does.

* This might be total B.S. so bear with me. The Oscars are more boring now than a decade or two ago because of the information-sharing power of the Internet.

It's a generalization with flaws, but I believe the core of it is true. One reason people watch the Academy Awards is to find out who will win. The potential for surprise is what makes it fun.

But the Internet has increased both access to information and efficiency in sharing it. My theory is that, whether we seek out the information or not, it is much easier to predict the likely winners because information and trends about the Academy Award voters' views are much less confined than they used to be.

For example, Hollywood reporters gossip with voters to help them guess which movies will win. But instead of a reporter's findings getting buried in the pages of a month-old entertainment magazine, the information makes it onto the Internet. The findings of dozens of reporters and gossip-mongers are also available. The data can be aggregated, and fairly accurate trends can be teased out by newspaper reporters, for example, who can help make the trends conventional wisdom.

This might be a clearer example of the power of aggregated information. In the last Presidential election, a few web sites allowed people to bet on who would win. Odds where determined by the number of people who wanted to buy shares in a Presidential candidate. Almost everyone bet money on the candidate they were going to vote for. But even if they weren't, they were betting on the candidate they thought was most likely going to win based on the information they gathered from friends, family, the news, and their community.

Well, the percentage of shares each candidate got matched the election results almost exactly, and was more accurate than almost every poll. The effect was like a Gallup poll with 100 times the sample size.

While the pool of Academy Awards voters is much smaller than the voting public, and the information about their intentions less freely shared, the principle is the same. The Internet has helped the availability and gathering of data to make it easier to pick winners in the Academy Awards. There will still be surprises because the information available is incomplete, but the "insider information" accessible to the public that exists today is certainly more than was accessible 10 years ago. The downside to knowledge is that it conflicts with surprise.