It’s the end of Oscar season and the awards have all been handed out. There isn’t much left to do, but analyze just how accurate the precursors were. Here are the big winners & losers. This looks at only their winner selections. Comparing nominees to the Oscars would be far more challenging and time consuming. There really isn’t much commentary for these, so I’ll just highlight the rankings.

Big Winners

The Guilds The Directors, Cinematographers and Audio Society had perfect scores this year, largely because they only have one category each that has a direct correlation to Oscar. Of the multi-category guilds, the Actors had the best year getting four of five categories. The Producers got two of three (thanks to a tie for Best Picture), rounding out the winners.
Critics You have to give critics leeway when selecting potential Oscar winners, since most of them aren’t in the business of prognosticating with their awards (unless you’re a certain top-matching group this year). The cut off to be a big winner is a 60% matching score. Topping the list, unsurprisingly is the Broadcast Film Critics who changed their name to “Critics’ Choice” even though their membership requirements don’t typically permit smaller publications from getting selected and thus aren’t really that representative. That being said, the had a near-90% rating this year picking 17 of 19 Oscar winners. Behind the is a very consistent group, the Phoenix critics who once again had a terrific year prediction 14 of 18 categories. Washington DC, Florida, St. Louis, Southeastern and Houston critics were also very good at prediction, as was the international group Online Film Critics Society which picked 8 of 13 prizes.
Other Groups It would be easy to cite the USC Scripter Awards as the best, but they had only one category, so it’s either 100% or 0% for them. The true winner, though is a tight race with the Online Film & Television Association barely edging out the Golden Globes. The OFTA picked 16 of 21 winners, though one tie in Supporting Actor helped. The Globes, because they have three categories that are split drama/comedy have added opportunities. They got 8 total predictions right out of 11 categories (14 if you count the three split categories).

Big Mehs

The Guilds The Visual Effects Society, Art Directors, Makeup Artists, Sound Editors each had multiple categories that could match the Oscar, with one of them being commonly linked. It’s hard to call them winners when they have two or three stabs at victory. The Writers Guild (thanks to an ineligible screenplay) and Annie Awards each got half of their correlating categories right.
Critics If you got forty-percent or more, you qualify as a “meh.” These groups didn’t match that well with the Oscars, but that isn’t a bad thing (just like matching Oscar isn’t a bad thing). The New York Online Critics led this list followed by Kansas City. Of the oldest critics organizations out there (sometimes referred to as the Big Four), only Los Angeles made this list, fairly low with 42.8% matching. Kansas City is a fairly old group as is Chicago, both showing up on this list. Others making appearance were critics groups in Austin, Detroit, Oklahoma, San Francisco, Vancouver, London and Toronto.
Other Groups The Spirit Awards are typically one of the worst groups to predict the Oscars because their pool of eligible choices is very limited. That being said, their voters tend to pick films that are also Oscar nominees. While their lower categories didn’t match, the Spirits matched five of their top six category winners to the Oscars, a rare and unprecedented feat. They had a better-than-average outcome. The same could be said of BAFTA, the British equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Artists and Sciences. They got eleven of their twenty-one common categories right, though part of the issue was that the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor Oscar winners weren’t eligible for BAFTA.

Big Losers

The Guilds With three chances to predict the Oscar winner, the Costume Designers came out with not a single match. Meanwhile, the Editors failed in both of their two categories.
Critics This year’s biggest loser is the Big Four. While Los Angeles critics made the “Meh” section, New York Critics, National Society of Film Critics and National Board of Review were all in the lower third. New York did the best with a scant 2 of 10 while NSFC got 1 and NBR got the biggest loser title with zero. Boston Online Critics were also joined in the bottom by San Diego, Indiana, Utah, Boston and Las Vegas critics groups.
Other Groups Once again, this year’s big loser is the Satellite Awards. I respect that they go out of their way to pick unique and interesting choices a lot of the times, but they are a very poor Oscar prognosticator, this year matching only 8 of 19 categories.