Who will win the 2016 Oscars, according to social media predictions

Disclosure: Alexander Leung is the Media & Partnerships Manager at Lamplight Analytics.

Global anticipation is building for the Oscars and many are trying to guess the winner of the coveted award.

In the not-so-distant past, we’d discuss it among our friends with little idea of whether our discussions reflected the opinion of the masses. With social media, the opinions and comments of the world are now at our fingertips. Social media aggregation represents one of the largest and most robust sets of data in the world, that’s constantly updated in real time, providing insights at the speed of thought.

To make sense of the buzz (and because we’re big nerds here at Lamplight Analytics), we used our tool to look at each actor and actress using social media analytics data across social media platforms last week to see who was leading the pack in conversations and sentiment.

We wanted to see if the eventual winners were who the audience was actually rooting for online. The Academy and audience don’t always agree on which actor or actress should take home the golden statue. For brevity’s sake, we’ll only be looking at the category of the “Best Actor”.

For the Best Actor nomination, Leonardo DiCaprio wins on social media buzz (by a long shot)

We found that Leonardo DiCaprio unsurprisingly dominated the conversation, taking the bulk of online buzz in the lead up to the ceremony.

Last week, Leonardo Dicaprio generated on average 32,000 mentions daily, reaching a high of over 76,000 mentions a day.

In comparison, Bryan Cranston comes in second with a high of 43,000 mentions per day. Leo’s lead makes sense, as anticipation runs high over whether he’ll finally receive an Oscar after repeated failed nominations. Leo recently took home the 2016 Golden Globe and BAFTA, which either makes for a thrilling turn of events should another actor steal the crown, or a hat trick worthy of a star of his stature.

A worthy mention: the bear in The Revenant was completely snubbed, but probably deserved a nomination based on his social buzz.

Leo may be the king of online buzz, but Eddie Redmayne appears to win hearts

Our sentiment score provides a general understanding of what people are thinking, feeling and talking about. We can see that Leo’s and Eddie’s sentiment scores vary drastically. Much of the negativity centers around the inevitability of Leo winning the award, and comparisons made between him and other actors deserving of an Oscar, but had never won one before, with Will Smith being the predominant example.

For Eddie Redmayne, his positive sentiment score and the attributed mentions seem to coincide with the times. With transgender identity and rights at the center of social conversations in the US and abroad, driven in part by Caitlyn Jenner’s transition and shifting attitudes for more inclusive representation both onscreen and offscreen, Redmayne’s role in The Danish Girl comes at an important time. Despite the perceived sidelining of Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, transgender actresses in Tangerine (2015) who did not have the platform that Redmayne did, the actor has nevertheless been warmly received by social media users.