@Ziddletwix would you be willing to share the reasoning behind your position here?

@brod for why a big bet, i did a similar best pic bet last year around this time & it was fun to track during the season. plus, ammon is usually good for kalshi/poly odds if you shave a few pp (kalshi was at 68% & i gave him 71%), so to get liquidity it was easier to do it all at once.

for why OBBA, it's the obvious (& only) frontrunner.

for why >71%, that's trickier to justify. & tbh i haven't followed this awards season as closely as the prev 2 yrs, so wouldn't shock me if i'm out of touch. but my primary reasoning here is that i think we have way more info about the awards season than we used to (more reporting, more precursors, more online discussion, etc etc), & so people have been underconfident about best picture (i.e., they should trust the early frontrunner, because again OBBA is very obviously a huge early frontrunner, that's not the interesting part).

i'd say there have been two recent best pic winners that weren't the early season favorite—green book & CODA. both beat very similar movies—roma & power of the dog were critical darling netflix projects without broad commercial appeal. while n=2 can only tell you so much, i think prognosticators probably made basically the exact same mistake (anti netflix bias, no theatrical release to generate interest, etc etc). and neither "frontrunner" was particularly strong (early in the season, it would have been shocking that CODA could win, but not at all shocking PotD would lose).

OBBA doesn't have any clear weaknesses to me. it's adored by critics, but unlike most critical darlings it had a giant buzzy release and lots of people saw it/talked about it. it's a huge crowd pleaser, it has a good narrative (the academy liked to give PTA the token nominations even when his movies alienated audiences, this is his first in his entire career with broad normie appeal).

and above all, i placed my bet once i saw it start to steamroll the precursors (i don't recall even oppenheimer being so dominant). i was confused by the real money price for it tbh—it spiked to 65%+ the weekend of release, which seemed way too high to me (so much uncertainty left), and then it dropped a ton despite no other movie making a clear move to surpass it, and it was still <60% when the precursors started (it was beginning to rise to 70%+ the day i was trying to get action on the bet).

fwiw, i think the easiest way for it to go awry would probably be a foreign film like it was just an accident or etc. i wasn't following any of this in 2019 so i don't know what the odds on parasite were, i left it out above bc IIRC there wasn't much of a 2019 frontrunner for most of the season. but the academy is more international and i think that's the area where it's least predictable, so imo that's the one area where my "we know way more than we used to" doesn't apply. marty supreme overlaps with OBBA too much, and while we can't be wholly sure until it releases, i'm pretty confident it won't be as broadly commercially appealing (e.g., uncut gems is one of my favorite movies of the decade, but broader audiences hated it, again OBBA is unusual in that it's vastly more commercial than anything PTA has done before this). hamnet looks and sounds like the sort of movie that contends at oscars (e.g., memories of shakespeare in love & etc), but i think its odds are quite a bit overrated atm. TIFF might have called green book but its hugely overrated as a recent predictor. the audience awards do matter but we have plenty of other data that it's more divisive in the academy.

@Ziddletwix thanks for the detailed explanation! I’m not a film guy and oscars are one of those things I wouldn’t know where to begin to forecast it, so very informative to see your thoughts

This market is & will be somewhat duplicative with all the other multiple choice markets for best picture, but real money markets have OBBA as an unusually large early favorite, so it's convenient to have a simple binary market to track (and if it becomes an overwhelming favorite, it's most efficient for liquidity to use binary, so it's useful to have this market lying around, even if I usually make a high liquidity dependent MC after noms are announced).