Sunday is Hollywood’s biggest night of the year, when A-list stars will strut down the red carpet before cramming into the Dolby Theatre for the 88th Academy Awards.
Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this year’s Oscar nominees last month, Hollywood has been abuzz with controversy over the lack of diversity in the field of acting nominees as well as the usual speculation over who will win.
It’s a virtual certainty that host Chris Rock will will address the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but the results of this year’s Academy voting won’t be broadcast until the award show airs on ABC, Sunday at 7 p.m. EST.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from making predictions. Fortune‘s colleagues at Entertainment Weekly published their picks, including The Big Short for Best Picture. That film has also been tabbed to win the night’s biggest award by multiple other publications, from Variety to statistician Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which bases its Oscars picks on a predictive formula that tracks actors’ and movies’ previous wins throughout awards season. Notably, The Big Short won best adapted screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards and also took the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards, which has predicted the Academy’s Best Picture choice 8 out of the past 10 years.
Here’s a look at who the other experts are picking to win at the Academy Awards:
Hollywood experts
The website GoldDerby.com tracks the picks of entertainment industry pros to predict awards throughout the year. For this weekend’s Oscar race, most of the experts tracked by the site are leaning toward The Revenant, though it’s far from a consensus, with Spotlight and The Big Short also receiving votes.
Every one of the site’s experts tabbed Brie Larson, from Room, to win Best Actress and The Revenant‘s Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor, which would be the first Oscar win for both actors. In the supporting actor/actress categories, GoldDerby’s experts leaned toward The Danish Girl‘s Alicia Vikander and Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone.
THE REVENANT, Leonardo DiCaprio, 2015Photograph by Kimberley French — TM and Copyright 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved./Everett Collection
Las Vegas odds
When in doubt, look at the Vegas odds. Johnny Avello, the director of race and sports operations at the Wynn Las Vegas casino, handicapped this year’s Oscars race for USA Today, with The Revenant taking the lead with even odds that outpace Spotlight (8 to5) and The Big Short (6 to 1). As for the acting nominees, Avello tells the newspaper that Larson and DiCaprio are the runaway leaders, along with Stallone and Vikander, though there could be “possible upsets” in the supporting acting fields from Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance and Steve Jobs‘ Kate Winslet.
Left to right: Steve Carell plays Mark Baum and Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett in The Big Short from Paramount Pictures and Regency EnterprisesPhotograph by Jaap Buitendijk — Paramount Pictures
Social media
Data and analytics company ListenFirst tracks social media conversations across a variety of online platform partners—Facebook, Google, Instagram, Tumblr, Wikipedia, and YouTube—and tracks the volume of daily engagements with entertainment brands and products, including movies. The company tracked the number of Internet searches across various platforms for each of the Best Picture nominees during the week before the nominations were announced last month and the week after, and then compared those numbers to the weeks around each film’s initial release.
Which film saw the biggest increase in search volume post-nomination? Larson’s little seen Room, which grossed only $12.7 million at the box office, saw a nearly 283% increase in searches the week after its nomination compared to the weeks around its limited release.
SPOTLIGHT, from left: Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d’Arcy James, Michael Keaton, John Slattery,Photograph by Kerry Hayes — Open Road Films/Everett Collection
Fellow independent film Spotlight also got a big boost in search volume (177%), while Brooklyn and The Big Short were the only other films to see their searches more than double around the nominations.
Interestingly, fellow nominee Mad Max: Fury Road‘s search volume dropped more than 85% around its nomination, though that might have something to do with the fact that the film was released last May and had been out of theaters for months when nominations were announced.
However, while The Revenant‘s search volume increased just 52% around its nomination, but that film saw the highest number of searches overall during that period. In other words, if Internet searches determined the Oscars, then Leo and The Revenant would have to be feeling pretty comfortable going into Sunday.
