After thinking about the post I wrote earlier today about data mining, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could predict this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture based on the number of Facebook Fans the movie has or the number of people listing that movie in their interests. The results were actually a lot less interesting than I thought they'd be, and it looks like Inception is the clear fan-favorite based on what Canadians have indicated that they are interested in on Facebook (information via Facebook's self-serve advertising tool):
Black Swan - 19,580
The Fighter - 19,960 (though this was for "Fighter")
Inception - 128,200
The Kids Are All Right - 0
The King's Speech - 0
127 Hours - 3,600
The Social Network - 0
Toy Story 3 - 280
True Grit - 3,700
Winter's Bone - 0
However, if we look at the number of fans each movie has on their Facebook page, we get slightly different results:
Black Swan - 468,079 (Interestingly enough, this is a generic Facebook Fan Page)
The Fighter - 76,844
Inception - 5,591,684
The Kids Are All Right - 42,018
The King's Speech - 48,617
127 Hours - 136,414
The Social Network - 221,395
Toy Story 3 - 600,00+ (Disney appears to have set up separate fan pages for each region/language)
True Grit - 21, 254
Winter's Bone - 22,211 (What the hell is this movie, anyways? I've never heard of it).
In both lists, it looks like Inception is the clear favorite. However, it also looks like the producers of Inception spent the most time and money on their Facebook Page.
I'd love to go back over the past 5 (or ten or fifteen!) years of Oscar winners and nominees and compare them to the number of Facebook Fans. It would be interesting to see if there is one category where Canadians (or perhaps another country) predicted the winner every year.
-Parker