For this year's Academy Awards, TipTop was the only place I needed to be at to get the most out of the entire 2010 Oscar's Celebrations. For some, seeing celebrities strut their fashion sense down the Red Carpet was the best part of watching the Academy Awards, and catching up on the After Party gossip & Oscar fashion trash talking was even better. This year it was fun & insightful to take a look at this glitzy event through TipTop's celebrity search results & Oscars leaderboard trend charts. Keeping up with the Red Carpet after party tweets via TipTop was also a trip, learning how Meryl Streep makes it all good,  wondering about the deal between Steve Martin and George Clooney, and what about that Sandy Powell outfit! We now know Cinnabuns are out & who the Worst Dressed & the Best Dressed celebrities were are and will be from Khloe Kardashian and the fashion police.

From the rant to the results & key findings: Overall, using social media data to predict the Academy Award winners based upon the sentiment analysis of millions of tweets related to the Oscar nominees proved successful in a number of ways. For the thirteen nominations tracked, TipTop's Oscar's Tip Leaderboard showed the winners 46% of the time. TipTop's results illustrate the ease of making predictions through proper semantic analysis of tweets; displaying positive & negative trends (Click piTs Leaderboard Charts) around social media topics like actors & movies, and extracting summaries (key tweets & top Web sites) from the data to provide insights into why a topic is trending. 

1. In the case of the Oscar's winners, public opinion doesn't determine the outcome of the Academy Awards, as we saw in the choice of Sandra Bullock (Best Actress piTs Leader) over Carrey Mulligan (Best Actress Tips Leader).
2. Using non-English title keywords as the basis to collect and analyze English language tweets doesn't provide accurate results. For example, The Secret in Their Eyes versus El Secreto de Sus Ojos skewed the leaderboard results for Best Foreign Language Film.
3. TipTop's prediction success for the seven "major" awards was much higher than for the other awards with less data to analyze.  The larger the amount of
   data processed, higher the likelihood that TipTop's prediction was right. Using TipTop to pick the major awards seemed to
   prove at least a 200-300% higher success rate than random Oscar
   predictions. Best Picture was particularly hard to get right this year because there were ten nominations instead of five to
   pick from.
4. TipTop
   provided a powerful analytics tool that could be used by a human being
   to make high-quality predictions. There were many ways to use the
   analysis to derive predictions (Tip & piT Leaderboard Trend Charts, Tip & piT summaries, TipTop search results, etc.). If more people had made predictions
   based on TipTop using the analysis, some of them would have been even
   more successful than those who did.

82nd Academy Award Ceremony – 2010 Oscar Winners:

• Best Picture:  Oscar Winner – The Hurt Locker;  Tip Leaderboard Winner – An Education;   TipTop Editorial Pick – Avatar

• Best Director: Oscar Winner – Kathryn Bigelow;  Tip Leaderboard Winner – Kathryn Bigelow; TipTop Editorial Pick – Quentin Tarantino

• Leading Actor: Oscar Winner – Jeff Bridges; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Jeff Bridges; TipTop Editorial Pick – Jeff Bridges
• Leading Actress: Oscar Winner – Sandra Bullock; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Carrey Mulligan; TipTop Editorial Pick – Carrey Mulligan

• Best Adapted Screenplay:  Oscar Winner – Precious; Tip Leaderboard Winner – An Education; TipTop Editorial Pick – An Education
• Best Animated Film:  Oscar Winner – Up;  Tip Leaderboard Winner – Fantastic Mr. Fox; TipTop Editorial Pick – Coraline

• Best Cinematography: Oscar Winner – Avatar; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Avatar; TipTop Editorial Pick – Avatar

• Best Documentary: Oscar Winner – The Cove; Tip Leaderboard Winner – The Cove;  TipTop Editorial Pick – Food, Inc.
  

• Best Foreign Language Film: Oscar Winner – The Secret in Their Eyes; Tip Leaderboard Winner – The White Ribbon; TipTop Editorial Pick – The White Ribbon

• Best Original Score: Oscar Winner – Up; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Fantastic Mr. Fox; TipTop Editorial Pick – Sherlock Holmes

• Best Original Screenplay: Oscar Winner – The Hurt Locker; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Inglourious Basterds ; TipTop Editorial Pick – Inglourious Basterds

• Best Supporting Actor: Oscar Winner – Christoph Waltz; Tip Leaderboard Winner – Stanley Tucci; TipTop Editorial Pick – Christoph Waltz

• Best Supporting Actress: Oscar Winner – Mo'Nique;  Tip Leaderboard Winner – Mo'Nique; TipTop Editorial Pick – Mo'Nique

Trend
analysis of real-time social media as a predictive indicator is an
active area of research at TipTop Technologies, and we look forward to presenting
more insights  into the relationship between sentiment trends and prediction in financial
markets, shopping patterns, and political opinion like in our President Obama In-Depth Coverage (See TipTop's Blog post).

Greg
Martin
& the TipTop
Team