Debating ‘House of Cards’: What the Show Gets Right and Wrong About Journalism

The Washington that majestically unfurls in the credits for “House of Cards” is recognizable to anybody who has spent time there. But even though it can be a monumental kingdom filled with portent, it can also be a fairly quotidian and sometimes ugly small town â€" but that’s not the kind of place you make a huge, expensive television show about.

An original series picked up and distributed by Netflix, “House of Cards” is a great looking, lavishly made 13-episode series based on a BBC miniseries. It was developed and produced by Beau Willimon, a guy steeped in politics as an aide to Charles Schumer, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton and who also wrote “The Ides of March,” a film directed by George Clooney that got high marks from politicos for its verisimilitude.

“House of Cards” revolves around Frank Underwood (played with lizard-like glory by Kevin Spacey), a Democrat and House Majority Whip, who, when passed over for a promotion to Secretary of State wreaks revenge on all wo would lay him low. His willing partner is Zoe Barnes (played by Kate Mara), a reporter/blogger at The Washington Herald, a fictional establishment newspaper in the capital.

Given that the series seems intended to pull back the blankets on the “real” side of both politics and media â€" two professions held in profoundly low regard by the rest of the world â€" we thought it might be fun to go argue about what the series gets right and wrong. We decided a New York/DC and politics/media division of labor might yield a worthy discussion: Ashley Parker currently covers Congress and has covered a number of campaigns. David Carr writes about media for the business section and writes about pop culture as well.

A cautionary note: Netflix began streaming the entire 13-episode season on Feb. 1 so our cadence in reviewing the episodes â€" every two or three days over the next month â€" is an entirely artificial one. If you haven’t started watching “House of Cards,” know that spoilers abou! nd here. Read at your peril.

Episode One

Synoposis: Frank Underwood, confronted by the broken promise from the president, begins laying down track to run over those who wronged him. Zoe Barnes, frustrated by her lowly status at the newspaper, seeks to form alliances that will allow her to prosper professionally.

Carr: I am struck by the visual vocabulary of the show. Politics, no matter how sleazy, go off in rooms and halls that could well have hosted Louis XIV. In spite of the fact that Mr. Underwood says he is there to “clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” the sheer marbleness of his environs suggests that the plumbing is kept carefully out of view.

Journalism gets very different art direction. The lighting in The Washington Herald is brutal, irradiating the pasty face trolls who are trapped in cubes there and the furniture looks like it came from a V.F.W. hall. (To be fair, the director David Finche filmed the newsroom scenes in part of the offices of The Baltimore Sun, so it’s not like the general aesthetic came from nowhere.)

Zoe Barnes’ apartment is one of the saddest places on earth â€" a second floor walk-up on a grubby commercial strip full of water (or worse) stains, pizza boxes and windows so dirty they don’t function as such. The only thing missing is an underfed cat with an untended litter box who hates her guts, but you can almost smell it anyway. The dreary, humble backdrop seems meant to establish her cred as a blogger. This revolution will come from people on laptops who have no furniture.

That dissonance extends to fashion. While Mr. Underwood and the women and men who click behind him as he patrols the corridors in search of souls to snack on are impeccably turned out, Ms. Barnes is a walking pile of laundry. I edited a weekly ! newspaper! in Washington D.C. staffed by very talented young people. And I also encountered many young staffers on the rise on the Hill. I didn’t see the two groups of young people as fundamentally different: They were ambitious and idealistic in equal measure while Ms. Barnes’ desires seem more inchoate and epically shallow.

Oddly enough, it is Ms. Barnes’ wardrobe and not her enterprise as a reporter that opens up the gates to Mr. Underwood’s world. She attends the symphony on a random date in a little white dress that etches her figure and catches a backward glance from Mr. Underwood. When she is sent a photo of the congressman checking her out, she takes that as permission to show up at his home at 10:30 at night â€" and she is invited inside. The pair proceed to have a conversation about her breasts, framed in a push-up bra and v-neck shirt. After she leaves, Mr. Underwood’s wife (played with frozen precision by Robin Wright) wonders aloud whether that gambit actually works on anyone. The answer ut in the real world is not for long, while the answer on the show is yet to be determined.

I’m glad the show exists, I care about the characters and am eager to watch more. But I’m still going to need some convincing, particularly in terms of the characters’ motives. Mr. Underwood’s desires are vividly stated in his winking asides to the camera. What does Ms. Barnes want She tells her editor and anyone else who will listen that she is tired of covering Fairfax County and wants to be moved “online,” where she will go “underground.” Why To what end

Given that you’ve started covering Congress and have been around politics for much of your career, Ashley, I’m wondering what clanked and what connected in the series so far

PARKER: The show seems to get the micro and macro right, but it’s those brushstrokes in the middle â€" where the story is really being told â€" that sometimes blur.

On those tiny details that no one but the most in-the-weeds of Washin! gton stal! warts pay attention to, “House of Cards” is dead on â€" the opening credits, with the colorful but faded row homes and the shot of the Kennedy Center glowing translucent silver at night; the paper visitor’s badge that the White House chief of staff wears when she pays Mr. Underwood in his House office; the hand sanitizer dispensaries that serve as sentries throughout the Capitol; the pristine copy of Roll Call casually set out on the table in Mr. Underwood’s office; the security detail assigned to the majority whip. All exactly right.

And in terms of capturing the broad truths about the city, the show comes pretty close, as well. It gets at the ultimately transactional nature of much of the nation’s capital â€" the former governor of Pennsylvania who delivers his state in exchange for the vice presidency, or the way Mr. Underwood expects a plum assignment for his role in helping the president’s campaign. And it gets at the perpetual striving. “I’m better than what they have me doing,❠Ms. Barnes says, a lament that I imagine nearly every Washington staffer/aide/journalist/human being has felt at one time or another.

When Mr. Underwood, talking about his plan to discredit the president’s pick for the Secretary of State job believes he should have been his, says, “Nobody’s a Boy Scout, not even a Boy Scout,” he might as well be channeling a political truth as old as time. Willie Stark told Jack Burden the exact same thing in “All the King’s Men,” with his classic, “There’s always something.”

But there are things I take issue with, Zoe Barnes, for starters. I have a feeling that, going forward, we’ll be talking a lot about this young reporter who seems more than willing to trade sex for scoops. But for now, I’ll just say that the overtly transactional â€" not to mention sexual â€" nature of Ms. Barnes’s first approach to Mr. Underwood seems a bit too, well, overt, transactional and sexual.

“I protect your identity, I print what you tell! me, and ! I’ll never ask any questions,” she says, offering to be a virtual transcription monkey after her sexy outfit and picture gets her literally through the front door. (I can’t imagine many publications â€" dead-tree, online, or otherwise â€" scrambling to hire a reporter whose opening pitch is that she’ll ask no questions.)

And, as Politico’s Jake Sherman rather aptly pointed out to me this week: “The only way I would ever show up at the majority whip’s door at 10:30 at night was if we had evidence he had murdered someone and I needed to track him down ASAP.” Presumably, a few other news developments would do the trick for an at-home stake-out, but you get the idea.

Coming soon: Episode 2, in which Mr. Underwood snacks on fellow politicians and Ms. Barnes’s appetites draw suspicion from her colleagues.

The Breakfast Meeting: Nielsen Adds Web-Linked TVs to Ratings, and a Tight Oscar Race’s Final Recap

Nielsen announced that its TV ratings would begin including viewers who watch shows on Internet-connected TVs, and pledged to include those who use iPads or other mobile devices in the future, Brian Stelter writes. Although the percentage of TV viewers who rely on the Internet exclusively is negligible, television executives are concerned that many consumers are being missed regularly. Most Internet viewings of TV shows are not counted in Nielsen’s ratings because they are shown without commercials or with different commercials than when they aired on television â€" and new streaming services, like Aereo and one in the works from Intel, stream shows and ads without cable. The expanded ratings will allow executives to count customers that these types of services may steal away from cable.

A lively Oscar season comes to a close on Sunday with a very tight race for best picture, Melena Ryzik says. At least six of the nine films in the category are real contenders, she writes, and audiences can expect difficult choices for best supporting actor (in which five previous winners have been nominated), best director and best original screenplay. Nearly all the best-picture nominees have had a strong year at the box office, a contrast from past seasons, which, along with a Oscars ceremony that will contain musical numbers for every age group and the winsome but impish Seth MacFarlane, will probably mean high ratings for the telecast. Here are Ms. Ryzik’s predictions (“Argo” takes best picture). Don’t forget to fill out your ballot online.

Sake is not just for sushi bars anymore, a new ad campaign wo! uld have consumers believe. Ty Ku, a sake maker, says that its new, multimillion-dollar push is the first national commercial series for a sake brand, Andrew Adam Newman reports. The spot, which will air starting Wednesday on networks like AMC, BET and the Food Network, stars the singer CeeLo Green, a part-owner of the company, and shows him passing a bottle of Ty Ku to beautiful women in different scenarios, from sushi bar to poolside to nightclub. It is intended both to show sake’s versatility and to portray Ty Ku as a premium brand, much like Patrón tequila.

CNBC has purchased “Nightly Business Report,” a pioneering public television series that has struggled in recent years, from the investment firm Atalaya Capital Management for an undisclosed price, Elizabeth Jensen reports/a>. CNBC will begin producing the show, which reaches 96 percent of television homes in the United States, from its New Jersey headquarters on March 4. The purchase is the show’s third change of hands in three years and will probably mean greater stability and certainly a stronger financial base for the program.

Mike Fayette, an engineer at the New York State Transportation Department, broke the rules by giving an interview to a reporter at The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Thomas Kaplan writes. His supervisors moved to fire him, and he decided to retire in February. The episode, strange but small, might have gone away were it not for the bizarre reaction of a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Howard B. Glaser, who read Mr. Fayette’s disciplinary record aloud on the radio and described him as a troubled employee. Mr. Fayette thought Mr. Glaser’s disclosure was inapp! ropriate ! and possibly merited litigation, but Mr. Glaser claimed that all of the records were public and that he was trying to correct a narrative in news reports that Governor Cuomo had unfairly fired someone just for speaking to the press.

Oscar Predictions, Election-Style

Twice before, in 2009 and 2011, I sought to predict the Academy Award winners in six major categories based on a mix of statistical factors. My track record Nine correct picks in 12 tries, for a 75 percent success rate. Not bad, but also not good enough to suggest that there is any magic formula for this.

So this year, I have sought to simplify the method, making the link to the FiveThirtyEight election forecasts more explicit. This approach won’t be foolproof either, but it should make the philosophy behind the method more apparent. The Oscars, in which the voting franchise is limited to the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, are not exactly a democratic process. But they provide for plenty of parallels to political campaigns.

In each case, there are different constituencies, like the 15 branches of the Academy (like actors, producers and directors) that vote for the awards. There is plenty of lobbying from the studios, which invest millions in the hopes that an Oscar win will extend the life of their films at the box office. And there are precursors for how the elections will turn out: polls in the case of presidential races, and for the Oscars, the litany of other film awards that precede them.

So our method will now look solely at the other awards that were given out in the run-up to the Oscars: the closest equivalent to pre-election polls. These have always been the best predictors of Oscar success. In fact, I have grown wary that methods that seek to account for a more complex array of factors are picking up on a lot of spurious correlations and identifying more noise than signal. If a film is the cinematic equivalent of Tim Pawlenty â€" something that looks like a contender in the abstract, but which isn’t picking up much support from actual voters â€" we should be skeptical that it would suddenly turn things around.

Just as our election forecasts assign more weight to certain polls, we do not treat all awards equally. Instead, some awards have a strong track record of picking the Oscar winners in their categories, whereas others almost never get the answer right (here’s looking at you, Los Angeles Film Critics Association).

These patterns aren’t random: instead, the main reason that some awards perform better is because some of them are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. For instance, many members of the Screen Actors Guild willvote both for the SAG Awards and for the Oscars. In contrast to these “insider” awards are those like the Golden Globes, which are voted upon by “outsiders” like journalists or critics; these tend to be less reliable.

Let me show you how this works in the case of the Best Picture nominees. There are a total of 16 awards in my database, not counting the Oscars, that are given out for Best Picture or that otherwise represent the highest merit that a voting group can bestow on a film. (For instance, the Producers Guild Awards are technically given out to the producers of a film rather than the film itself, but they nevertheless serve as useful Best Picture precursors.) In each case, I have recorded how often the award recipient has corresponded with the Oscar winner over the last 25 years (or going back as far as possible if the award hasn’t been around that long).

The best performance has come from the Directors Guild of America. Their award for Outstanding Direction in a Feature Film has corresponded with the Academy Award for Best Picture a full 80 percent of the time. (Keep in mind that Best Picture and Best Director winners rarely differ from one another â€" although this year, as you will see, is very likely to be an exception.) The Producers Guild awards are the next most accurate; their award for best production in a feature film has a 70 percent success rate in calling the Academy’s Best Picture winner. Directors and producers are the movers and shakers in Hollywood, and any evidence about their opinions ought to count for a lot - as it does in our system.

By contrast, the Golden Globe for best dramatic motion piture has only matched with the Oscar winner about half the time. And some of the awards given out by critics do much worse than this: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Film has matched the Oscar only 12 percent of the time, for example. Our formula, therefore, leans very heavily on the “insider” awards. (The gory details: I weight each award based on the square of its historical success rate, and then double the score for awards whose voting memberships overlap significantly with the Academy.)

Ideally, we would want to look not only which films win which the awards, but also how close the voting was (just as it is extremely helpful to look at the margin separating the candidates in a political poll). Unfortunately, none of the awards publish this information, so I instead I give partial credit (one-fifth of a point) to each film that was nominated for a given award.

The short version: our forecasts for the Academy Awards are based on which candidates have won other aw! ards in t! heir category. We give more weight to awards that have frequently corresponded with the Oscar winners in the past, and which are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. We don’t consider any statistical factors beyond that, and we doubt that doing so would provide all that much insight.

Sometimes, of course, it shouldn’t require a formula to know who is going to win. Such is the case with the Best Picture nominees this year. One film has dominated the category, and it is “Argo.”

“Argo” has won the top awards given out by Hollywood directors, producers, actors, writers and editors, all of whom will also vote for the Oscars. It also won the Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for Best Picture, whose mmbership has significant overlap with the Academy.

“Zero Dark Thirty” may have won slightly more critical acclaim, but the critics do not vote for the Oscars; the insiders do. And there has been absolute consensus for “Argo” among the insiders. It would be an enormous upset if it were to lose. (“Lincoln,” once considered the front-runner, has been nominated for almost every best picture award but won none of them. Counting on a comeback would be a bit like expecting Rudolph W. Giuliani to have resurrected his campaign in Florida in 2008 after finishing in sixth place everywhere else.)

If “Argo” is a shoo-in for Best Picture, then you might expect Ben Affleck to be the clear favorite for Best Director as well. And he almost ! certainly! would be â€" if only he had been nominated.

Instead, in what might have been karmic payback for “Gigli”, Mr. Affleck was snubbed by the Academy. So despite winning the Directors’ Guild award, the Golden Globe and the Bafta for best director, Mr. Affleck will not win an Oscar in this category.

The next most-common winner of best director awards, after Mr. Affleck, has been Kathryn Bigelow, for “Zero Dark Thirty.” But Ms. Bigelow was snubbed by the Academy as well.

This creates a tremendous problem for any method that is based on looking at other award winners. In fact, it gives me unhappy memories of our infamous Taraji P. Henson pick in 2009. (In that case, there was a lot of disagreement about which actresses were nominated into the leading and supporting categories, making it hard to trck one award to the next one.)

One thin reed is that David O. Russell won the Satellite Award for “Silver Linings Playbook”. This is, in fact, the only one of the nine awards we track whose winner was even nominated for the Oscar. However, the Satellite Award has historically matched the Academy Award for Best Director only 38 percent of the time, so it gets little weight in our system.

Instead, the method defaults to looking at partial credit based on who was nominated for the other awards most frequently. Among the five directors who were actually nominated for the Oscars, Steven Spielberg (for “Lincoln”) and Ang Lee (“Life of Pi”) were nominated for other directorial awards far more often than the others, and Mr. Spielberg slightly more regularly than Mr. Lee. So the method gives the award to Mr. Spielberg on points, but it’s going to be blind luck if we get this one right: you can’t claim to h! ave a dat! a-driven prediction when you don’t have any data.

One place where “Lincoln” will almost certainly pick up hardware is for Best Actor, where Daniel Day-Lewis should win for his portrayal of the 16th president. Bradley Cooper (“Silver Linings Playbook”) did win the Satellite Award and the National Board of Review’s award for best actor, but neither has a strong track record, whereas Mr. Day-Lewis has swept the awards that predict Oscar success well.

There is considerably more uncertaintyin the Best Actress category, and it is here where our practice of weighting the awards based on their past reliability may be the most helpful.

Jennifer Lawrence, Mr. Cooper’s co-star in “Silver Linings Playbook,” won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actress. That has been the single most reliable award in the Best Actress category in the past, corresponding to the Oscar winner two-thirds of the time. This is very possibly because actors and actresses make up the largest plurality of the Academy’s 15 groups of voters, creating especially strong overlap between the populations.

However, the SAG Award still goes wrong one-third of the time (it did so as recently as last year, when Viola Davis won it, while Meryl Streep won the Oscar). Ms. Lawrence would not necessarily be favored if there were a consensus against her in the other awards.

There isn’t really any such consensus, however. Jessica Chastain won the Golden Globe for best Best Actress in a drama, but she was ! not match! ed up directly against Ms. Lawrence, who was nominated for (and won) the comedic category instead. Ms. Chastain also won several awards given out by critics, but these have less predictive power. (It also seems reasonably clear that Academy members are not enamored of “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

The 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva (“Amour”), meanwhile, won the Bafta in an upset and is now attracting a lot of buzz as a potential Oscar surprise. But one rule-of-thumb in elections analysis is that “momentum” is often given too much credence by pundits. I suppose I can’t say for certain that the same is true in Oscars coverage â€" and perhaps it is more relevant in the case of a film like “Amour,” which may not have been seen by all that many Academy members until recently. But the SAG Awards have a better track record than the Baftas across all acting categories, despite usually predating them on the calendar. The safe money therefore remains on Ms. Lawrence, with Ms. Riva and Ms. Chastain being iable alternatives.

This is almost certainly the most competitive category: all five nominees have won Oscars before, and there is no consensus choice. In fact, the competition was tough enough this year that some well-known actors (like Leonardo DiCaprio for “Django Unchained”) that won critics’ awards were not even nominated by the Academy.

As is the case for the other acting categories, however, our method tends to default to the SAG winner when there is a lack of consensus otherwise: that was Tommy Lee Jones for “Lincoln.”

Christoph Waltz (“Django Unchained”) won both the Golden Globe and the Bafta (and might be my choice if I were going based on which performance I liked the most personally, instead of trying to gu! ess at wh! at the Academy will do). But one red flag is that Mr. Waltz was not even nominated for several other awards, including the SAG, suggesting that he may lack support among some Academy constituencies.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman (“The Master”) could be a compromise candidate: he was nominated more widely than Mr. Waltz, and won more awards than Mr. Jones. But his wins came in awards that were voted on by critics, historically the least reliable.

Finally, there is the sentimental choice: Robert De Niro for “Silver Linings Playbook,” who last won an Oscar in 1981 (“Raging Bull”). However, Mr. De Niro has not any major awards for “Silver Linings Playbook,” and so ranks last among the five nominees by our statistical method.

Simply put, it would be unusual for an actor to win an award after having been shut out previously. If he wins, it might constitute evidence that members of the Academy are treating the Oscars differently than they do other awards, using them as a proxy for lifetme achievement - or that lobbying efforts on behalf of Mr. De Niro had been successful. But such attempts at log-rolling could also backfire: it’s plausible, for example, that votes received by Mr. De Niro could come at the expense of Mr. Waltz, since both films were produced by the same studio, making it easier for Mr. Jones to win by plurality.

There is considerably less reason for last-minute campaigning in this category: Anne Hathaway as about as safe a bet to win for “Les Misérables” as Mitt Romney was to win Utah. If Sally Field or Amy Adams wins instead, it will probably be time for me to retire from the Oscar-forecasting business.

Oscar Predictions, Election-Style

Twice before, in 2009 and 2011, I sought to predict the Academy Award winners in six major categories based on a mix of statistical factors. My track record Nine correct picks in 12 tries, for a 75 percent success rate. Not bad, but also not good enough to suggest that there is any magic formula for this.

So this year, I have sought to simplify the method, making the link to the FiveThirtyEight election forecasts more explicit. This approach won’t be foolproof either, but it should make the philosophy behind the method more apparent. The Oscars, in which the voting franchise is limited to the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, are not exactly a democratic process. But they provide for plenty of parallels to political campaigns.

In each case, there are different constituencies, like the 15 branches of the Academy (like actors, producers and directors) that vote for the awards. There is plenty of lobbying from the studios, which invest millions in the hopes that an Oscar win will extend the life of their films at the box office. And there are precursors for how the elections will turn out: polls in the case of presidential races, and for the Oscars, the litany of other film awards that precede them.

So our method will now look solely at the other awards that were given out in the run-up to the Oscars: the closest equivalent to pre-election polls. These have always been the best predictors of Oscar success. In fact, I have grown wary that methods that seek to account for a more complex array of factors are picking up on a lot of spurious correlations and identifying more noise than signal. If a film is the cinematic equivalent of Tim Pawlenty â€" something that looks like a contender in the abstract, but which isn’t picking up much support from actual voters â€" we should be skeptical that it would suddenly turn things around.

Just as our election forecasts assign more weight to certain polls, we do not treat all awards equally. Instead, some awards have a strong track record of picking the Oscar winners in their categories, whereas others almost never get the answer right (here’s looking at you, Los Angeles Film Critics Association).

These patterns aren’t random: instead, the main reason that some awards perform better is because some of them are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. For instance, many members of the Screen Actors Guild willvote both for the SAG Awards and for the Oscars. In contrast to these “insider” awards are those like the Golden Globes, which are voted upon by “outsiders” like journalists or critics; these tend to be less reliable.

Let me show you how this works in the case of the Best Picture nominees. There are a total of 16 awards in my database, not counting the Oscars, that are given out for Best Picture or that otherwise represent the highest merit that a voting group can bestow on a film. (For instance, the Producers Guild Awards are technically given out to the producers of a film rather than the film itself, but they nevertheless serve as useful Best Picture precursors.) In each case, I have recorded how often the award recipient has corresponded with the Oscar winner over the last 25 years (or going back as far as possible if the award hasn’t been around that long).

The best performance has come from the Directors Guild of America. Their award for Outstanding Direction in a Feature Film has corresponded with the Academy Award for Best Picture a full 80 percent of the time. (Keep in mind that Best Picture and Best Director winners rarely differ from one another â€" although this year, as you will see, is very likely to be an exception.) The Producers Guild awards are the next most accurate; their award for best production in a feature film has a 70 percent success rate in calling the Academy’s Best Picture winner. Directors and producers are the movers and shakers in Hollywood, and any evidence about their opinions ought to count for a lot - as it does in our system.

By contrast, the Golden Globe for best dramatic motion piture has only matched with the Oscar winner about half the time. And some of the awards given out by critics do much worse than this: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Best Film has matched the Oscar only 12 percent of the time, for example. Our formula, therefore, leans very heavily on the “insider” awards. (The gory details: I weight each award based on the square of its historical success rate, and then double the score for awards whose voting memberships overlap significantly with the Academy.)

Ideally, we would want to look not only which films win which the awards, but also how close the voting was (just as it is extremely helpful to look at the margin separating the candidates in a political poll). Unfortunately, none of the awards publish this information, so I instead I give partial credit (one-fifth of a point) to each film that was nominated for a given award.

The short version: our forecasts for the Academy Awards are based on which candidates have won other aw! ards in t! heir category. We give more weight to awards that have frequently corresponded with the Oscar winners in the past, and which are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. We don’t consider any statistical factors beyond that, and we doubt that doing so would provide all that much insight.

Sometimes, of course, it shouldn’t require a formula to know who is going to win. Such is the case with the Best Picture nominees this year. One film has dominated the category, and it is “Argo.”

“Argo” has won the top awards given out by Hollywood directors, producers, actors, writers and editors, all of whom will also vote for the Oscars. It also won the Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for Best Picture, whose mmbership has significant overlap with the Academy.

“Zero Dark Thirty” may have won slightly more critical acclaim, but the critics do not vote for the Oscars; the insiders do. And there has been absolute consensus for “Argo” among the insiders. It would be an enormous upset if it were to lose. (“Lincoln,” once considered the front-runner, has been nominated for almost every best picture award but won none of them. Counting on a comeback would be a bit like expecting Rudolph W. Giuliani to have resurrected his campaign in Florida in 2008 after finishing in sixth place everywhere else.)

If “Argo” is a shoo-in for Best Picture, then you might expect Ben Affleck to be the clear favorite for Best Director as well. And he almost ! certainly! would be â€" if only he had been nominated.

Instead, in what might have been karmic payback for “Gigli”, Mr. Affleck was snubbed by the Academy. So despite winning the Directors’ Guild award, the Golden Globe and the Bafta for best director, Mr. Affleck will not win an Oscar in this category.

The next most-common winner of best director awards, after Mr. Affleck, has been Kathryn Bigelow, for “Zero Dark Thirty.” But Ms. Bigelow was snubbed by the Academy as well.

This creates a tremendous problem for any method that is based on looking at other award winners. In fact, it gives me unhappy memories of our infamous Taraji P. Henson pick in 2009. (In that case, there was a lot of disagreement about which actresses were nominated into the leading and supporting categories, making it hard to trck one award to the next one.)

One thin reed is that David O. Russell won the Satellite Award for “Silver Linings Playbook”. This is, in fact, the only one of the nine awards we track whose winner was even nominated for the Oscar. However, the Satellite Award has historically matched the Academy Award for Best Director only 38 percent of the time, so it gets little weight in our system.

Instead, the method defaults to looking at partial credit based on who was nominated for the other awards most frequently. Among the five directors who were actually nominated for the Oscars, Steven Spielberg (for “Lincoln”) and Ang Lee (“Life of Pi”) were nominated for other directorial awards far more often than the others, and Mr. Spielberg slightly more regularly than Mr. Lee. So the method gives the award to Mr. Spielberg on points, but it’s going to be blind luck if we get this one right: you can’t claim to h! ave a dat! a-driven prediction when you don’t have any data.

One place where “Lincoln” will almost certainly pick up hardware is for Best Actor, where Daniel Day-Lewis should win for his portrayal of the 16th president. Bradley Cooper (“Silver Linings Playbook”) did win the Satellite Award and the National Board of Review’s award for best actor, but neither has a strong track record, whereas Mr. Day-Lewis has swept the awards that predict Oscar success well.

There is considerably more uncertaintyin the Best Actress category, and it is here where our practice of weighting the awards based on their past reliability may be the most helpful.

Jennifer Lawrence, Mr. Cooper’s co-star in “Silver Linings Playbook,” won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actress. That has been the single most reliable award in the Best Actress category in the past, corresponding to the Oscar winner two-thirds of the time. This is very possibly because actors and actresses make up the largest plurality of the Academy’s 15 groups of voters, creating especially strong overlap between the populations.

However, the SAG Award still goes wrong one-third of the time (it did so as recently as last year, when Viola Davis won it, while Meryl Streep won the Oscar). Ms. Lawrence would not necessarily be favored if there were a consensus against her in the other awards.

There isn’t really any such consensus, however. Jessica Chastain won the Golden Globe for best Best Actress in a drama, but she was ! not match! ed up directly against Ms. Lawrence, who was nominated for (and won) the comedic category instead. Ms. Chastain also won several awards given out by critics, but these have less predictive power. (It also seems reasonably clear that Academy members are not enamored of “Zero Dark Thirty.”)

The 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva (“Amour”), meanwhile, won the Bafta in an upset and is now attracting a lot of buzz as a potential Oscar surprise. But one rule-of-thumb in elections analysis is that “momentum” is often given too much credence by pundits. I suppose I can’t say for certain that the same is true in Oscars coverage â€" and perhaps it is more relevant in the case of a film like “Amour,” which may not have been seen by all that many Academy members until recently. But the SAG Awards have a better track record than the Baftas across all acting categories, despite usually predating them on the calendar. The safe money therefore remains on Ms. Lawrence, with Ms. Riva and Ms. Chastain being iable alternatives.

This is almost certainly the most competitive category: all five nominees have won Oscars before, and there is no consensus choice. In fact, the competition was tough enough this year that some well-known actors (like Leonardo DiCaprio for “Django Unchained”) that won critics’ awards were not even nominated by the Academy.

As is the case for the other acting categories, however, our method tends to default to the SAG winner when there is a lack of consensus otherwise: that was Tommy Lee Jones for “Lincoln.”

Christoph Waltz (“Django Unchained”) won both the Golden Globe and the Bafta (and might be my choice if I were going based on which performance I liked the most personally, instead of trying to gu! ess at wh! at the Academy will do). But one red flag is that Mr. Waltz was not even nominated for several other awards, including the SAG, suggesting that he may lack support among some Academy constituencies.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman (“The Master”) could be a compromise candidate: he was nominated more widely than Mr. Waltz, and won more awards than Mr. Jones. But his wins came in awards that were voted on by critics, historically the least reliable.

Finally, there is the sentimental choice: Robert De Niro for “Silver Linings Playbook,” who last won an Oscar in 1981 (“Raging Bull”). However, Mr. De Niro has not any major awards for “Silver Linings Playbook,” and so ranks last among the five nominees by our statistical method.

Simply put, it would be unusual for an actor to win an award after having been shut out previously. If he wins, it might constitute evidence that members of the Academy are treating the Oscars differently than they do other awards, using them as a proxy for lifetme achievement - or that lobbying efforts on behalf of Mr. De Niro had been successful. But such attempts at log-rolling could also backfire: it’s plausible, for example, that votes received by Mr. De Niro could come at the expense of Mr. Waltz, since both films were produced by the same studio, making it easier for Mr. Jones to win by plurality.

There is considerably less reason for last-minute campaigning in this category: Anne Hathaway as about as safe a bet to win for “Les Misérables” as Mitt Romney was to win Utah. If Sally Field or Amy Adams wins instead, it will probably be time for me to retire from the Oscar-forecasting business.