David Orr of Malibu has won the annual 2010 Oscar Picks challenge. Orr successfully predicted 15 Oscar winners out of the 18 nominees presented on The Malibu Times 2010 Academy Awards Ballot.
Orr got all categories correct except: Original Score (“Up” was the winner); Animated Short Film (which went to “Logorama”) and Foreign Film (the Argentinean film “El Secreto De Sus Ojos” took the Oscar).
Three other contestants each picked 14 correct choices. Overall, most ballots cast chose 12 Oscar winners correctly. The lowest correct tally on a single ballot was three: with the contestant correctly choosing Jeff Bridges for Best Actor, Sandra Bullock for Best Actress and “Avatar” for Best Visual Effects.
Forty-one of the 45 participants in the contest cast Jeff Bridges as their choice for Best Actor. Bullock was a favorite as well, ringing in 34 votes. However, the winner for the Best Picture Oscar, “The Hurt Locker,” did not do too well with The Malibu Times voters: only 18 cast the film, about a bomb squad’s experience during the Iraq War, as the winning choice. But the film’s Oscar-winning director, Kathryn Bigelow, garnered 29 votes from TMT’s voters. In contrast, only 12 chose “Avatar’s” director, Malibu local James Cameron, as the possible winning director. However, “Avatar” gathered more votes than Bigelow’s film, with 20 choosing it as the possible Oscar winner (“Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” were considered by many to be nose-to-nose in the race for Best Picture).
Many contestants cast the correct choices for the categories of Best Supporting Actress and Actor with 37 people voting for Mo’Nique (“Precious) and 34 for Christopher Waltz (“Inglorious Basterds”).
The least correctly chosen categories were that of the Foreign Film category, which only garnered three votes, and the Animated Short Film (“Logorama”) category, which got no votes.