Ben Zauzmer
Ben Zauzmer
Ben Zauzmer is a baseball analyst for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is widely known for predicting Oscar winners.
Education
In 2011, Zauzmer entered Harvard University to study Applied Math with a focus in government.[1] He received a The Bachelor of Arts degree in 2015.[3] Previously, he studied at Upper Dublin High School.[2]
Career
Ben Zauzmer works as a baseball analyst for the Los Angeles Dodgers, using math to identify strong players that the team could potentially acquire.[1] He joined the Dodgers in 2015.[2]
Oscar Predictions
In 2012, the first year that Ben Zauzmer made Oscar predictions based on mathematical modeling, he received an email from a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body that chooses the winners. Zauzmer was wrong to predict that the silent French film “The Artist” would win best picture, the member said — he and some of his friends in the Academy had heard that “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s steampunk adventure flick, had a better chance. Zauzmer “politely thanked him for his comments,” and was proven right — “The Artist” took home five Oscars that year, including best picture. [1]
As Zauzmer explains it, his dataset includes anything about movies that he can put a concrete number on.
The best predictors usually turn out to be previous award shows — if a director wins the Director’s Guild award earlier in the season, for instance, he or she has a good chance of winning the Oscar for best director — but it also includes critic ratings or “scores” on aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes. [1]
The success of his formulas — in 2018, he correctly predicted 20 out of the 21 categories that he put into his models — has earned him an annual column in The Hollywood Reporter. He documented his approach in a 2019 book, “Oscarmetics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood.”[1]
Zauzmer’s predictions for Oscars 2020:
Best Picture – “1917”
Best Director – Sam Mendes, for “1917”
Best Actor – Joaquin Phoenix, for “Joker”
Best Actress – Renée Zellweger, for “Judy”
Best Supporting Actor – Brad Pitt, for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”
Best Supporting Actress – Laura Dern, for “Marriage Story”
Best Original Screenplay – Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin-won, for “Parasite”
Best Adapted Screenplay – Taika Waititi, for “Jojo Rabbit”
Best Animated Feature – “Toy Story 4”
Best Documentary Feature – “American Factory”
Best International Feature – “Parasite”
Best Production Design – “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”
Best Cinematography – “1917”
Best Original Score – “Joker”
Best Original Song – “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” from “Rocket Man”
Best Film Editing – “Ford v Ferrari”
Best Visual Effects – “Avengers: Endgame”
Best Costume Design – “Little Women”
Best Makeup and Hairstyling – “Bombshell”
Best Sound Editing – “Ford v Ferrari”
Best Sound Mixing – “Ford v Ferrari”
Personal Life
Zauzmer hails from a suburb of Philadelphia. He calls his Reform synagogue his family’s “home away from home”:
“One thing I love about the Reform Judaism that I grew up with, and of Judaism in general, is that we’re always taught to ask why … to try to understand things for ourselves.
And that same spirit with which we approach religion is also I think a very useful one to approach statistics with: to not just accept anything, but to actually dive into the data and prove it or disprove it for yourself.”[1]