Who Will Win the Golden Globe For Best Actor? A.I. Predicts

On Sunday the 75th annual Golden Globe Awards will hand out trophies to a clutch of people you’ve probably heard of more than once. Less bloated than the Oscars, the Golden Globes is often a good barometer of the more interesting and thoughtful achievements in TV and film for a given year. But, just like any other awards show, guessing the winners is part of the fun. Which is where A.I. comes in.

For the two categories of Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) and Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama), Inverse has partnered with Unanimous A.I. and applied their unique systems to forecast the possible winners.

To predict the result of this and other categories, Unanimous A.I. used what’s known as swarm intelligence to forecast the week’s slate. About 50 people worked together as a hive mind to make picks. As you can see in the animation below, each participant controlled a little golden magnet and used it to drag the puck toward the answer they thought was the most likely outcome. As the users saw the puck move toward a particular outcome, it triggers a psychological response. They readjust their decision-making, building toward a consensus. Here’s Unanimous A.I. founder Louis Rosenberg explaining swarm intelligence at a recent TEDx Talk.

As a recap, here are the nominees for best comedy actor: Steve Carell (Battle of the Sexes), Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Hugh Jackman (The Greatest Showman), and Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out).

As is apparent in the diagram above, the hive really only believed the race was between Steve Carell and James Franco. And the hive overwhelmingly has high confidence that Franco will take home the Golden Globe for The Disaster Artist. Unanimous gives this prediction a 91 percent brainpower score, which is very high on their scale.

For the dramatic actor category, the nominees )are Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name), Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread)Tom Hanks (The Post), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), and Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.)

Here, the swarm focused on the race actually being between only Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis. And the highest confidence went to Oldman, with 84 percent brain power backing it.

Unanimous A.I. has made some scarily accurate predictions in the past using swarm intelligence, as a previous Inverse article explains. For instance, on the sports side of things, the swarm went a perfect 7-0 in its most recommended picks for an English Premier League slate earlier this season.

Sports, of course, are very different than Hollywood awards. In terms of performance of athletes and teams, a hive has more objective data to crunch. Whereas, the data for an awards show like the Golden Globes is more subjective. Plus, unlike a soccer or football game, the winners of the Golden Globes aren’t actually decided on Sunday, but rather, have been decided well in advance.

Will swarm A.I. be able to make just as accurate predictions with subjective data as it does objective data? We’ll see on Sunday.

The Golden Globes airs on Sunday, January 7, at 8pm eastern time on NBC. Come back to Inverse between now and then to check out swarm A.I. predictions for several other categories, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director.