In the main event, the math says that Anora is just barely ahead of a coin flip’s chance to win best picture. That’s perhaps a bit higher than some might suspect. Yes, it’s partly due to a string of impressive wins for Anora, including a mega-weekend of Critics Choice, Producers Guild and Directors Guild honors.

But it’s as much about the flaws in the other films’ Oscar résumés: Conclave reached second place by virtue of BAFTA and SAG wins, but would need to become the seventh film in 97 years to win without a directing nomination. The Brutalist won the Golden Globe for best drama, but would need to become the first best picture winner ever to overcome a lack of both a SAG ensemble and Eddie nomination. Emilia Pérez took the other top Golden Globe honor, but is understandably getting crushed in the betting markets, one factor in this model. A Complete Unknown got plenty of nominations but never won a significant best picture award all season long.

Sean Baker (Anora) and Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) are neck-and-neck, having each won a healthy dose of honors for their direction throughout awards season. But not all wins are created equal. In particular, the Directors Guild’s predictions of best director enjoy a stronger track record than any other predictor in any category: Only three DGA winners in the past half-century were nominated at the Oscars but lost. That slightly tips the scales toward DGA winner Baker, but with a hefty dose of uncertainty.

At the eleventh hour, the Screen Actors Guild made this a race. Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) appeared to be comfortably on his way to a second Oscar win. Then Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown) finally got that major win he’d been looking for on Sunday night. The model still prefers Brody, but this contest suddenly has genuine upset potential.

Best actress is neither an open-and-shut case nor a true neck-and-neck race. Demi Moore (The Substance) and Mikey Madison (Anora) went head-to-head at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild, and Moore swept all three. That’s enough for the model to call her the favorite, albeit less than any of the other acting frontrunners, but still at a respectable 52 percent. Madison’s signature win, the BAFTA honor, vaults her into second place at 22 percent. Looking for a bolder choice in your Oscar pool? Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here) is hardly out of this category at 14 percent.

Unlike the lead acting categories, this year’s supporting categories are relatively straightforward. Yes, it’s always possible to see an upset: 87.7 percent is not 100 percent! But make no mistake about it, Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) dominated awards season and is a strong frontrunner to cap it off with an Oscar.

There’s a theory out there that the controversy surrounding Karla Sofía Gascón could drag down her Emilia Pérez co-star, Zoe Saldaña. Tell that to the voters of the BAFTAs and the Screen Actors Guild, not to mention earlier awards shows like the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards. There are limits to what a mathematical model can bake in, but based on the data it does have, Saldaña has an almost a 9-in-10 chance to take this trophy.

Sean Baker’s script for Anora is a popular pick here, but at just 40.5 percent to win, there’s a 3-in-5 chance we see an upset. Anora’s strongest point on its résumé is a Writers Guild win over A Real Pain, coming at a ceremony in which the other three Oscar competitors were ineligible. Throw in a Critics Choice win for The Substance, a BAFTA win for A Real Pain and the Golden Globes honoring a script on the adapted side instead, and it all makes for one of the year’s most nail-biting races.

In recent years, the Academy loves honoring directors in the screenplay category. It’s been 14 years since the last original screenplay winner that didn’t include the film’s director among the list of nominated scribes, and seven years on the adapted screenplay side. At least in the adapted race, that streak might finally come to an end, thanks to Peter Straughan’s thrilling adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel Conclave.

Chris Sanders (The Wild Robot) earned his fourth nomination in this category, tied for the most of all time, but is still looking for his first win. The math gives him just above a coin toss’ chance to do so, at 55 percent. But don’t count out Flow — which joined Flee as the only movies in history nominated for both animated feature and international feature — or BAFTA winner Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

This category has relatively few reliable predictors compared to the others on the list. Making matters more difficult, many of the predictors we do have opted for titles like Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and Will & Harper, which were left out of the Academy’s top five. What we’re left with is a category where every nominee is above 1-in-10 to win, but no nominee reaches 1-in-3.

What a race this has been. On paper, Emilia Pérez stormed out to a big lead, fueled by its 13 nominations that eclipsed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s and Roma’s record of 10 nominations for an international film. But then the controversies started: first and foremost were Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweets, but also the sharply diverging opinions between critics (72 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences (16 percent). In the first year in Oscar history with two best picture contenders in this field, that might be enough for I’m Still Here to come from behind, even if it’s difficult for the model to fully account for this narrative.

Nathan Crowley and Lee Sandales are a combined 0-for-8 at prior Oscar ceremonies, but this might just be their year, thanks to their visually stunning re-creation of Oz for Wicked. The math is higher than most on Nosferatu due in large part to its win at the Art Directors Guild Awards in the period film category, but given that Wicked took the fantasy trophy and a host of other awards season honors, it’s still the movie to beat.

Best cinematography may be a much closer race than some are giving it credit for. The Brutalist’s BAFTA honor and the betting markets barely put it into first place, but plenty of critic honors leaned toward Nosferatu, which is a significantly stronger contender than you’d glean from the relative lack of people predicting it to win. Dune already won this race for its first installment and could still do so again, while Maria won the American Society of Cinematographers on Sunday night, so upset possibilities abound.

This has all the ingredients of a confounding category to those of us in the Oscar predictions business. Challengers claimed multiple precursor awards without getting an Oscar nomination. The American Cinema Editors’ Eddie Awards were understandably delayed until after the Academy Awards due to the fires in L.A. Three of the strongest best picture contenders seem to be in the top three here as well. Ultimately, the math weakly points toward BAFTA winner Conclave, as no BAFTA winner nominated in this category has lost the Oscar since Vice (2018).

Dune won this category three years ago, and it’s now favored to join The Lord of the Rings, Alien, Avatar and Indiana Jones as the only franchises to win multiple competitive Oscars for visual effects. Standing in its way will be Wicked — which has more total nominations than these other four films combined — and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — which pulled off the victory over Dune in the Visual Effects Society’s top category.

The original The Wizard of Oz gave us some of the most memorable production design and costume design in the history of cinema. But in production design (not to mention in best picture), it had the misfortune of going up against awards juggernaut Gone With the Wind, and costume design wouldn’t exist as a category for another nine years. This year, Wicked has a strong chance to claim both of those categories, with production designs and costume designs that are chock-full of homages to the classic original.

For moviegoers who saw The Substance, the visuals of Demi Moore’s and Margaret Qualley’s slowly disintegrating bodies — and the ultimate, grotesque conclusion it all leads to — may be forever seared into our memories. None of that is possible without the work of Pierre-Olivier Persin, Stéphanie Guillon and Marilyne Scarselli, and they’re just above 50-50 to win an Oscar for it. If you’re looking to pick an upset, go first to the team from Wicked who charmed us with a green Elphaba and an oh-so-popular Galinda.

The past three years have all featured intense, epic best original score winners from dark, dramatic best picture nominees (Dune, All Quiet on the Western Front, Oppenheimer). This year might continue that trend, with Daniel Blumberg’s The Brutalist on top at 40.9 percent. But with a number of predictors leaning toward the un-nominated Challengers, this race is a little bit more upset-prone than people might realize.

The math shows a 2-in-3 chance that a song from Emilia Pérez wins this award, and the only question is which one (“El Mal” is the stronger of the two choices). Ever since the Academy restricted films to two nominees in this category, concerns of vote-splitting have been overblown: There have been four multi-nominated films in that era, and three (Slumdog Millionaire, La La Land, Barbie) won best original song. But given the controversy surrounding Emilia Pérez … is this what allows Diane Warren to finally win an Oscar on her 16th try? (This time she’s nominated for The Six Triple Eight‘s “The Journey.”)

This is the fifth year of the combined best sound category, but since four years of data isn’t enough to build a model on, the math is still awkwardly trying to catch up by patching together data from both before and after the merger. If this were a year with two sound categories, it’s entirely possible that we’d see a split verdict, especially with a trio of musical films vying for the sound mixing title in particular. In the real world, the weak statistical prediction is Dune: Part Two, but four films are above 14 percent to win.

There isn’t enough data to predict the three short film categories mathematically, though betting markets currently favor The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent for live-action short, Wander to Wonder for animated short, and I Am Ready, Warden for documentary short.

I very much hope all of you reading this enjoyed this year’s slate of films as much as I did. But more importantly, I hope that you, too, enjoyed spending time with the people you got to share these movies with.

Ben Zauzmer is the author of Oscarmetrics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood.