Nate Silver explains his missed Oscar predictions

The man behind FiveThirtyEight.com went four for six in his Oscar predictions, and here he breaks down the reasons for the misses.

The advantage in making a subjective judgment is that you may be able to account for information that is hard to quantify -- for example, Rourke's behavioral problems or the politics of Sean Penn playing a gay icon in a year where Hollywood felt very guilty about the passage of Proposition 8. The disadvantage is that human beings have all sorts of cognitive biases, and it's easy to allow these biases to color one's thinking. I would guess, for instance, that most critics would have trouble decoupling the question of who they thought should win the Oscars -- those performances they liked the best personally -- from who they thought actually would win them.

You can see Nate Silver's original Oscar predictions here.