It’s that time of year again: the 6th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool is underway! (It was previously known as the BrendanLoy.com Oscar Pool, but the LRT “brand” is taking over all of my contests now. I’m looking at you, NIT Pool!)
To enter the pool, just submit your Oscar predictions here. As always, contestants are urged to enter using their full name, if possible, or at a minimum, a pseudonym or partial name that is meaningfully identifiable to me and/or this blog community.
The deadline to enter is one hour before the Academy Awards broadcast begins, i.e., Sunday at 5:00 5:30 PM Mountain Time (7:30pm Eastern, 4:30pm Pacific). As always, the pool is free, and the prize is simply bragging rights.
(Then come back here Sunday night for an Oscars live blog / live chat, with live results of the Oscar Pool posted throughout the show. We’ll get started at 6:00 PM Mountain Time, when the ABC pre-show begins.)
For continuity’s sake, I’m using the same scoring system as the last five years: 15 points for Best Picture, 9 apiece for the directing and lead acting categories, 6 each for the supporting acting categories, 4 for the screenplay categories, 2 for original score & song, and 1 per award for everything else. That’s 80 points in all. (The all-time record winning point total is 72 out of 80.)
You can read all about the history of the Oscar Pool here. The defending champion is Vlada Shelkova, a 2008 graduate of Newington High School and a sophomore at Stonehill College. Other past champions are Lisa Velte (2008), Kristin West (2007), Chris McLemore (2006) and Jackie Domaingue (2005).
P.S. Here’s the Facebook Event Page for the Oscar Pool & Live Blog.