Top 5 Gold Derby Academy Awards predictions experts from the last 5 years

Who is the top performing pundit, the ultimate soothsayer in the mystical multiverse of entertainment awards predictions?

Opinions are plentiful. Predictions are abundant. And the fine folk at Gold Derby rank and quantify any and every pundit year-by-year.

But what, however, of an all-time ranking? Historically, which Gold Derby expert rates best for Oscar prognostication?

We crunched the numbers over the last five years of Oscar nominations and wins. The combination of nominations and wins is key because it provides a larger sample size:

• For nominations, there is a choice of 120 predictions. (Ten slots for Best Picture, plus five slots each for the remaining 22 categories.) Overall, a far more challenging exercise, as the field is not yet set.

• Then obviously, you must select the winner in each of the 23 categories.

• Therefore, for one Academy Awards season, there are 143 data points (120 nominations plus 23 winners.) Multiply this across the last five years, and you have over 700 data points. This is a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

The stats don’t lie. The stats reveal all.

How did Gold Derby experts fare at the 2022 Academy Awards?

For the Oscars nominations in March 2022, Peter Travers achieved the highest nomination accuracy, predicting 89/120 at 74.17%.

For example, at the 2022 Academy Awards, Peter Travers from ABC predicted 89 of 120 Oscar 2022 nomination categories, at a strike rate of 74.17%.

In the same year, Gold Derby experts who topped the charts for predicting Oscars wins were Peter Travers, Wilson Morales and Scott Mantz. The three were tied for predicting the highest win accuracy, predicting 22/23 at 95.65%.

In the same year, Peter Travers predicted a near perfect 22 of 23 Oscar categories to win, or 95.65% correct. That’s a strong sample size of 143 points of data, 143 opportunities to predict right or wrong.

The criteria used to calculate the Best Gold Derby expert over the last 5 years

The formula used to calculate the top pundit was: accumulative total % across each data category (wins + nominations) divided by the number of corresponding of awards.

e.g. nominations prediction rate % for Oscars 2022 + win prediction rate % for Oscars 2022 / 2 = average of Oscar 2022 season.

In the above scenario, this is a calculation for one year. For the breadth and depth of 5 years, this would be: nominations % + win % divided by 10.

Where a Gold Derby pundit was listed on the leaderboard for four years, the calculation would be divided by 8, or four years of nominations plus wins.

The omissions

To determine the top 5 pundits over the last 5 years, we require a minimum four-year track record of data. Therefore, on this basis, Glenn Whipp (LA Times) and Clayton Davis (Variety) do not qualify.

Whipp was a Gold Derby Expert from 2018 to 2020, but has not been listed on the site over the past two years. (It’s noteworthy that Whipp achieved an impressive 78.11% Oscar prediction accuracy during these three years.)

Similarly, Davis only has two years of data, 2021-22, with an average prediction accuracy of 76.12%. As the Variety Awards Circuit podcast proclaims, ‘we’ll stay close’ to the predictions performance by Davis for upcoming awards seasons.

In the highly commended category: Thelma Adams from Gold Derby. Picture courtesy of twitter.com/thelmadams

The highly commended top 5

Highly commended, but coming outside the final five:

• Tom O'Neil (Gold Derby) 75.44%

• Anne Thompson (IndieWire) 75.69%

• Thelma Adams (Gold Derby) 75.62%

• Joyce Eng (Gold Derby) 77.02%

The final 5: Gold Derby Oscars pundits from the last 5 years

Raise your glasses to the above top performers, and bow your deepest bow to the below top 5 Gold Derby Oscar pundits of the last 5 years.

#5 PETER TRAVERS (ABC) 77.33%

Peter Travers had the crystal ball finely tuned at the 2022 Oscars, winning the prediction race with 89/120 at 74.17%, just one correct prediction ahead of Joyce Eng, who achieved 88/120 at 73.33%. Travers shared equal first place for Oscar winners, missing just one winner at 22/23 with a strike rate of 95.65%

As the movie critic for ABC, Travers ranked third for predicting winners at the 2020 Oscars, hitting 20/24 at 83.33%.

In 5th spot, Peter Travers from ABC News. Picture courtesy of ABC News

#4 PETE HAMMOND (DEADLINE) 77.61%

Over the last five years, Pete Hammond has never been the outright winner for predicting Oscar nominations or wins. Hammond is, however, a consistent high achiever, and his fourth place ranking confirms his expertise.

#3 SASHA STONE (AWARDS DAILY) 77.99%

Founder of the Awards Daily blog, Sasha Stone is a juggernaut on the entertainment awards circuit.

At the 2021 Oscars, Stone ranked first for nominations with 94/120 at 79.66%. Two years earlier at the 2019 Oscars, Stone again topped the charts, correctly predicting wins 22/24 or 91.67%. The predictions achievement of that year saw Stone beat second place by three selections, which was 19/24 by Pete Hammond, Scott Mantz and Wilson Morales.

#2 SCOTT MANTZ (KTLA) 78.36%

Film critic Scott Mantz entered the stratosphere of top Gold Derby experts with a commendable equal first at the 2022 Oscars, predicting 22/23 at 95.65% wins. At the 2020 Oscars, Mantz was the outright leader with a win prediction of 91.67% or correctly selecting 22 out of 24 categories.

The king of Oscar predictions: Wilson Morales. Picture courtesy of Wilson Morales.

#1 WILSON MORALES (BLACKFILMandTV) 80.16%

Founder and Editor at BlackFilmandTV.com, Morales is the outright king of predictions.

Morales entered the Gold Derby scene in the year 2019, so the sample size is reduced across only four years’ of Oscar nominations and wins, totalling 1,144 data points. Still, the highlights reel includes:

• Tied for first with 22/23 or 95.65% wins at the 2022 Oscars;

• Among the highest prediction strike rate for nominations of the 2021 Oscars with 78.81%;

• High performer at the 2020 Oscars, correctly predicting 87.5% wins.

So while very little separates the top five (four of the five are separated by just over 1%), if you’re after any extra edge to get your Academy Awards bets over the line, however slim, keep Wilson Morales’s picks close at hand.