Best Picture and Screenplay Bets
Using AI and throwing it away
Here is a prompt to help you decide on Best Picture if you want to place a wager on Kalshi
“I have $5 to bet on Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards on Kalshi. The nominees are Sinners, One Battle After Another, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, F1, Frankenstein, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Bugonia, and Train Dreams.
Give me a betting strategy that maximizes my chance of turning $5 into real money. Consider: current odds and market prices on Kalshi, guild award history (DGA, PGA, SAG), which film won what, the box office argument for Sinners vs the critical consensus for One Battle, whether to go chalk or find value on a longer shot, and whether splitting the $5 across multiple contracts makes sense or if I should concentrate it.
Tell me exactly where to put the money and why, as if you were a sharp bettor not a film critic.”
A few things I keep coming back to:
The Academy has never given Best Picture to a horror film.
And it made money.
It’s the movie Tarantino made, From Dusk till Dawn
With a Hollywood production value
The industry spent all year pushing a film that lost money over the film that filled seats.
It’s about time we reware and encourage theatre going
A sharp bettor would call it mispricing.
Sinners at 23 cents is either the bet of the year or confirmation that the Academy rewards the room’s self-image over everything else
including their own stated survival as an industry.
Paul Thomas Anderson finally winning would be the Academy correcting 30 years of institutional guilt.
We are in a non-guilt era, he’ll make another great movie
As for Best Screenplay, $25 can make you $800 if you bet on Marty Supreme and as I wrote previously the film was sharp
Click HERE if you want to read it
But Claude.AI
Said NOPE
“Sinners is at 97% for Best Original Screenplay on both Kalshi and Polymarket.
That’s essentially a done deal.
The irony is actually interesting though.
The script is described as crackling with offbeat wit and restless energy by Variety and in any other year a Safdie screenplay would be the conversation.
But Coogler’s script has the full weight of the Sinners wave behind it, plus the historical significance angle.
If Coogler wins he’d be only the second Black writer to win Original Screenplay, after Jordan Peele for Get Out
also a horror film.
The way the night is likely shaping up, the screenplay categories are essentially the consolation prizes that keep both frontrunners from going home empty-handed.
Coogler wins Original Screenplay, PTA wins Adapted Screenplay
Marty Supreme’s real robbery is that in a year without Sinners, that script almost certainly wins.
Safdie writing a ping-pong obsessive character study is exactly the kind of original voice the screenplay category exists to reward.
Just bad timing.”
But there are no guarantees and I told this to AI
“On the “screenplay split” — it’s a real pattern:
The most instructive parallel is 2006.
Brokeback Mountain won Adapted Screenplay, Crash won Original Screenplay
and then Crash took Best Picture, shocking everyone.
The screenplay split is often how the Academy manages a two-film race without completely shutting out the loser.
This year Sinners and One Battle are positioned almost identically: one likely gets Original, one gets Adapted, and then Best Picture goes to one of them.
Template
Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan (1999) is the template everyone cites. Saving Private Ryan had the PGA and DGA in its corner plus the power of Spielberg.
Shakespeare in Love swept the BAFTAs right before Oscar night and that’s when the cracks appeared.
One Battle has the PGA and DGA. Sinners just won SAG. The dynamic is almost identical.”
Well, if there is anytime to tear up the template and throw out the AI is on original screenplay.
Marty Supreme was very original and played with Hollywood stereotypes and made Timothy an even hotter star.
So have a look at the lotto ticket
Maybe we will win a few bucks as consolation
Eric