Perhaps the only thing more complicated than predicting the Oscars is picking a pope. Fortunately for professional oddsmakers Paul Austin and Lenny Del Genio, no pope is up for the picking this month. But the Academy Awards are still on, and consequently, according to their bosses, there must be odds.
It’s a complex calculus that leads Del Genio, who has been figuring Oscar odds for Bally’s Las Vegas since 1981, to favor “Braveheart” or “Il Postino” as the Best Picture winner. The English perspective, on the other hand, has Austin of the London-based Ladbroke Group putting his bets on “Sense and Sensibility” or “Apollo 13.”
Each has his own formula for picking winners, which generally involves a carefully balanced synthesis of history, reviews, psychology, astrology, sentimentality, studio marketing techniques, previous awards won, inside gossip and old-fashioned personal hunches.
More often than not, those formulas seem to work. Austin has correctly predicted winners in the top three categories (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress) for the last five years, even if he’s occasionally off-kilter on the odds. Del Genio put his accuracy rate at 60 percent over the last 15 years, and last year he swept all categories.
In the Oscar oddsmaking business, there are good years, such as when Del Genio accurately picked prepubescent longshot Anna Paquin (“The Piano”) for Best Supporting Actress in 1992, and there are difficult years, such as when Ladbroke lost $40,000 on Austin’s dismal 1992 odds for “Unforgiven” for Best Picture, Al Pacino for Best Actor (in “Scent of a Woman”) and Emma Thompson for Best Actress (in “Howard’s End”).
As both oddsmakers can attest, the perils of predicting the Academy Awards can be great, nothing like the cakewalks of the Super Bowl or World Series.
“It’s impossible to computerize,” Austin says. “Because you’re dealing with 5,000 academy members, you have to take into account human thinking, human behavior and human psychology. It’s easier to predict who’s going to win the presidential election.” (Clinton, he says, is the runaway favorite.) First, of course, there’s the fear of being ridiculed by the film critics, the motion picture establishment, and the public at large if you’re wrong.
“Another problem is, if I mess up, I’ve got to wait another 12 months to prove I’m a good oddsmaker on the Oscars,” Austin says.
In the United States, Bally’s Oscar odds are supposed to be “for entertainment purposes only,” though committed office poolers nationwide and even some of the stars themselves follow Del Genio’s lines closely.
For Austin, though, the stakes are higher. England allows real money gambling on his Oscar lines. “I can tell you I am definitely called to account for my success or lack of it,” he says, recalling his greatest oddsmaking catastrophe. In 1993, he wrongly predicted which song would make it to the top of the English music charts on Christmas, resulting in Ladbroke’s sucking up a $300,000 loss.
“It ended up being a children’s television character, a poor man’s Barney pink with yellow spots who produced the worst record that anybody in Britain has ever heard,” Austin lamented. “I am still called ‘Mr. Blubby’ around the office.”
More important to Austin than guessing accurately, therefore, is predicting profitably. (Secretly, he suspects Susan Sarandon will nab the Best Actress award for her performance as a nun in “Dead Man Walking,” but publicly he set top odds, 4 to 5, on Emma Thompson for her role in “Sense and Sensibility” because of her hometown popularity.)
“It is a little skewed,” he admitted. “We’ve got nearly 2,000 betting shops in Britain, therefore if we’re going to make money in any category you have to figure the British gamblers are going to take the British actors first.”
This year, both Austin and Del Genio agree, all signs point to an oddsmaking disaster.
Other than Nicholas Cage for the Best Actor Oscar, neither lists a clear favorite in any of theother top categories. And even that category is giving Del Genio trouble.
“It’s rare when a great drunk or a great death happens on film and the academy doesn’t reward it,” Del Genio says. “But I’m going to give you another scenario: Cage and Penn split the vote and someone else wins.”
As charming as the barnyard fable film might be, oddsmakers don’t offer much hope for “Babe” winning the Best Picture award.
“My assessment of ‘Babe’ is that it was the politically correct thing to do,” Del Genio says. “This is not based on any inside information, I just think the academy is a little bit sensitive these days to politicians railing on them about family values. This is their reward, a pig that wants to be a sheepdog.”
Short of interviewing academy members’ psychotherapists, Del Genio said he informs himself by talking to 60 individuals “who have great information.”
Three are academy members. “They give me the ins, the whys, the prejudices and the intimacy inside the academy,” Del Genio says. Then there are the caterers and the security guards who work Hollywood parties, and another dozen sources who “give me great insight into what every critic around the country has said and why they said it.”
Austin said he reads every movie review he can get his hands on, then consults with about 20 movie buffs and colleagues before setting his line.
Professional oddsmakers could care less about picking out the most stirring performance or important social message in this year’s crop of films. The trick, Del Genio adds, is to be an academy analyst rather than a film critic.
“I find it is a much tougher job than putting odds on events like the Super Bowl,” he said. “Who was going to predict that ‘Babe’ was going to be nominated? I’m also a fellow who thought ‘Gandhi’ wouldn’t win for best picture, or Tom Hanks for best actor (in ‘Philadelphia’).”
Speaking of Hanks, Austin still hasn’t gotten over the fact that he wasn’t nominated as best actor for his astronaut-in-crisis role in “Apollo 13.”
“I thought the academy would go for history, even though I didn’t think his performance was nearly as strong as his two roles in ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Philadelphia,”‘ Austin asserts, like he really means it. Never mind he hasn’t actually seen “Apollo 13.”
For that matter, neither has Del Genio, who in fact rarely goes to any of the movies he’s putting odds on.
“The one year I did I found I was actually terrible at being a film critic and oddsmaker,” he says. “I usually fall asleep during movies anyway.”
Going to movies, both agree, only sucks up valuable time one could spend reading reviews.
Still, Del Genio feels sufficiently well-informed to gush about the best actress nominees: “There’s no one on that list that could win and surprise me. What great roles, and what great acting!”
Del Genio, normally just a sports oddsmaker, says he was pushed into forecasting the Oscars by a Bally’s vice president.
“I told him, ‘Who the heck is going to listen to a little fat kid from Harlem?”‘ Del Genio said. “The next day he came back and asked if I’d do it as a personal favor, so of course on that level, it was impossible to say no.”
In his first year, Del Genio correctly guessed 80 percent of the winners.
“After that, the phone rang off the hook and, not being complete idiots, we started telling everybody we were in the game of predicting the Oscars,” Del Genio said.
Del Genio said he used to get his best information by talking to folks who attended mass screenings of nominated films.
“If you spoke to enough people that went to enough screenings and the buzz was all the same, you had a real good intuitiveness about where it was going,” he said.
Life for Del Genio got tougher when studios started sending videos of their films to academy members so they could watch them at home. Del Genio admits he’s lost a bit of predictive accuracy since the advent of VCRs, and now he has to factor in the Martha Stewartesque packaging of those videos to academy members, (“Dead Man Walking” was sent to them in a coffin-like box) and other subtle forms of Oscar bribery by the major filmmakers.
Del Genio said he plans to read a book on Oscar night, March 25, because he can no longer stand the suspense. If so, he’ll miss out on one of Austin’s most intriguing forecasts.
“If Sharon Stone wins the Best Actress Oscar,” Austin predicted, on the fly, “we’d rate it 1 to 3 that she won’t be wearing underwear during her acceptance speech.”
