Can You Guess the Oscar Winner?

2 minute read

Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony features a raft of powerful performances from the nominees for Best Actor and Best Actress. Will Reese Witherspoon take home a second statue for Wild, or will Julianne Moore take home her first for Still Alice? Can Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking out-compute Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing?

To see what factors have historically weighed on the Academy’s selection, TIME built a simple guessing game that allows you explore the entire history of best actors and actresses by asking the computer questions about them. Give it a whirl and see our analysis below.

 

A few observations we took away from the game:

Although the Academy Awards are an American production, we import a lot of our best actresses–27 out of 71 actresses and 27 out of 77 actors were born abroad.

Fortune does not favor the elders. Only 21 of the Best Actress winners were over 40 at the time the award was presented, and only seven were over 50. (Jessica Tandy, notably, was 80 when she won for “Driving Miss Daisy.”) The men tend to be a bit older, but there are still only 15 winners over age 50.

Dramas are the overwhelming favorite genre for winners. Only three women have won best actress for a movie that is not characterized by the online film information site IMDB at least in part as a drama: Claudette Colbert for “It Happened One Night,” Loretta Young for “The Farmer’s Daughter” and Julie Andrews for “Mary Poppins.” Likewise, there are only five Best Actor winners in non-dramas. (Romance is a far better way to narrow down the Best Actress field, with about half the movies falling into that category as well.)

Notes: Age is computed on the day the actor or actress receives the award.

Data comes from IMDB.com. All photos courtesy Getty Images. Design by Bronson Stamp, code by Chris Wilson and research by Joseph Lin.

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Write to Chris Wilson at chris.wilson@time.com