Jason Turer has been an Oscars obsessive since he was a teenager. The first Academy Awards he watched was the controversial 1999 ceremony, when Shakespeare in Love took home the best picture gong over Saving Private Ryan; since 2001, he’s attempted to predict Oscar nominees and winners every year. For many Oscars fans, predictions often take the form of, say, an office sweep or game between friends; others might make a list in their notes app and check off correct predictions on the night.
But for the past 10 years, 36-year-old Turer has been predicting the Oscars competitively on the industry blog and fansite Gold Derby – an outlet for awards season fanatics to score points based on their predictions in a game that combines the frivolous glitz of the Oscars with the obsessive, stats-based fandom of fantasy football. He describes his experience of the site, where he counts as an “all-star user” because of his high success rate, as one of “friendly competition – we’re all having fun here,” before conceding: “One of my life goals is to correctly guess every single category one year.”
