Oscar Halo: Academy Awards and the Matthew Effect

This is great! I wish more people did analyses like these.

One nitpick: intuitively, I'm not comfortable with the idea that a 20% chance for each nominated movie is a reasonable prior. There is a ranking of the 5 nominations implied by the voting process (http://tr.im/gEYg). However, not being very familiar with Academy Award voting, I'm not sure if this data is ever publicly released. Anyone?

To clarify on the prior: It's not always 1/5 -- it's 1/(number of nominations for that category-year). In some years there have been fewer than 5 nominations for certain categories, which this model takes into account.

I do agree it would be interesting to bias it by the preferential ballots from the nominations process. Unfortunately I couldn't find that data anywhere...