Friday Nite Lite: Oscars and “Owlcatraz”

Good Evening!

It is a big weekend for Hollywood, the Academy Awards are Sunday night, so we will start tonight’s cartoons with a few funnies about that golden bald man.

Nate Silver has some predictions up at his blog, Oscar Predictions, Election-Style .He is putting his statistics and calculations to work using:

the other awards that were given out in the run-up to the Oscars: the closest equivalent to pre-election polls. These have always been the best predictors of Oscar success. In fact, I have grown wary that methods that seek to account for a more complex array of factors are picking up on a lot of spurious correlations and identifying more noise than signal. If a film is the cinematic equivalent of Tim Pawlenty — something that looks like a contender in the abstract, but which isn’t picking up much support from actual voters — we should be skeptical that it would suddenly turn things around.

Just as our election forecasts assign more weight to certain polls, we do not treat all awards equally. Instead, some awards have a strong track record of picking the Oscar winners in their categories, whereas others almost never get the answer right (here’s looking at you, Los Angeles Film Critics Association).

These patterns aren’t random: instead, the main reason that some awards perform better is because some of them are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. For instance, many members of the Screen Actors Guild will vote both for the SAG Awards and for the Oscars. In contrast to these “insider” awards are those like the Golden Globes, which are voted upon by “outsiders” like journalists or critics; these tend to be less reliable.

Go check out his predictions, and I will make sure to update you all on Nate’s results.

Now for the cartoons.

Cagle Post » Oscar Picks

2/24 Luckovich cartoon: The winner is… | Mike Luckovich

Cagle Post » The Sequester

This is a good segue to cartoons about Sequester…

Cagle Post » Sequester countdown

Cagle Post » Knowing Where to Cut

Cagle Post » Sequestration Immolation

Cagle Post » Three Blind Mice

Now, this next cartoon is very clever…even if we may disagree with it:  Cagle Post » Obama’s monster

I can’t help it, I am a sucker for Frankenstein.

Personally, I think they all are to blame!  One more for you on the Sequester.

2/20 Luckovich cartoon: Space invader | Mike Luckovich

Okay, have you heard about the Olympics cutting wrestling from the games…

Cagle Post » Wrestling Cut

Cagle Post » Olympic Wresting

Now for the gun issue:

Cagle Post » Nut or Shooter

Cagle Post » Guns And Jobs

This one above is thought provoking…

Let’s end this with a few odds and ends:

Cagle Post » China cyber hacking

Cagle Post » The New Normal

Cagle Post » Alabama lawmaker says babies are organs

This is an open thread…