Oscar Picks Pool for 2011 Now Open

You've probably already seen it in the announcement on top of each forum, but in case any of you don't venture to those pages often, a quick note: we've officially re-opened the Oscar Picks game from last year, as of this afternoon.

Same deal as last year: all registered users can dive right in and make their picks. Non-registered users just need to enter and confirm an email address, and they're good to go. You can update your picks any time up until the ceremony starts on February 27th.

As a small bonus, we'll send a DVD of any of the ten Best Picture nominees to whoever finishes with the highest score. Ties will be broken based on whoever submitted their final list earliest.

Make your Oscar picks!

Aye. I have made mine. Please, don't hold me to ANY of them.

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"I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg

Picking Football teams is much easier.

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

Quick update: we've already got half as many picks submitted as we had last year, in just a few days time! Here's hoping everyone gets them in; it makes for better, more interesting statistics the night of the ceremony.

And, of course, if you have any questions or run into any technical problems, just post about it in here and I'll get right on it.

Last chance, people! You've got less than eight hours until the Oscar Picks area closes and switches over to the leaderboard:

http://www.movieforums.com/oscars

No time to slack off any longer!

I made a $8.05 Bet on The Following :

Actor - Colin Firth
Film - Social Network
Director - Tom Hooper
S Actor - Geoffrey Rush
S Actress - Hailee Steinfeld
Documentry - Restrepo
Foreign L - Incendies

If i win, i get in return $53,818.13

BRING ON THE OSCARS...despite the fact i'll lose.

The day you win on that bet is the day

Wins the Super Bowl and I have given up on that

What if we want to revise? Do we just do it again?

I'm concerned about Melissa Leo -- will those Variety ads hurt her?

MovieMad -- no wonder your picks have quite a return!

I see we can revise our picks.. so ignore my question!

i know i won't win but if i went with Bale & Leo, i might have a better chance. But really, i'm just gonna enjoy the night, despite i furiously hate the oscars because of reasons i have explained 8 bajillion times.

Correct. You can update them right up until the cutoff sometime around 8:00 PM.

I want to congratulate fiscal because of all our regular members, he came through with the best results. He doesn't need any excuses. I know that two other "r-type guys" tied or beat him, but I don't know; they seemed like the same guy who voted for two different directors to cover themselves.

I could have done plenty better but I screwed up major because all my changes cost me. But see, I'm a blowhard trying to come up with crummy excuses. Besides, changes have often helped me in the past.

Congrats again, fiscal!

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Yes, congrats, fiscal. I nearly gottcha!

I made three changes to my picks. Every one went from a correct prediction to an incorrect one. I would have tied fiscal!

See, Mark, I guess we should never change our minds. Stick with the initial choice!

I wasn't able to get to the chat... Did you all have fun?

Hi all, my wife actually won. We're different people, I assure you. New to the site and looking forward to some good movie conversation. Thanks very much.

People can decide for themselves who "won." As I explained before, I offered to reward Fiscal because the only person ahead of him is part of an apparent married couple who picked identically in 23 categories and switched off only in Best Director, which was (not coincidentally) the most up-in-the-air category of the night. So, it's a "win" on a technicality, because we're definitely going to have some simple rules against this form of collusion next year.

All of this is a long way of saying: Fiscal wins, because it's a test of skill and knowledge, not a competition to see who can find and exploit things.

Congratulations, Fiscal.

I did something similar. Always with the second-guessing.

It was a great time! Server didn't so much as hiccup this time (guess all the changes from last year worked), and there were just a few tiny leaderboard issues very early in the night, though I think most of those were me forgetting I had to run two separate scripts after each award. After the first 4 or 5 awards, though, it went really smoothly. I should be able to keep tweaking and improve it even further next year. We had 50% more people make picks this year than last, too, so hopefully that trend continues.

Thanks Chris. As I said, there's nothing in the rules against there being more than one entry per household, and if you think others are not filling out ballots together you are mistaken. This is the whole point of Oscar contests, family bonding time. I would urge you to limit it to one entry per household next year. Now let's get back to talking movies. Love the site. Keep up the good work. Thanks very much.

As I pointed out many times last night, there's a world of difference between "filling out ballots together" and colluding as strategically as possible.

If you want to talk about movies, we'll gladly have you. You're getting your DVD (I ordered it last night), but I'm afraid you're not entitled to any sort of personal approval on my part, or from anyone else. I think the spirit of the competition is pretty clear: a test of one's prediction skills and film knowledge and the like. And on that measure, Fiscal wins. I don't think this is really disputable; I have seven siblings, and I could have recruited them to ensure I won under almost any permutation last night, but that wouldn't be much of a victory. If there were a competition for maximizing one's chances of winning the DVD, then you'd undoubtedly be the winner, but that's obviously not what we were going for here.

Yay, I win! Glad to be here.