The markets have spoken, and Oscars voters got it 80 percent right. Or vice versa.
Both Polymarket and Kalshi users guessed the winners of 19 of 24 Academy Awards categories correctly, a 79.17 percent hit rate. Not bad.
Not to brag, but The Hollywood Reporter got 21 of 24 categories right, an 87.5 percent hit rate. Bet THR coming in spring 2027? (This isn’t investment advice.)
Polymarket and Kalshi got the same five categories wrong: live-action short film (Two People Exchanging Saliva and The Singers tied), animated short (The Girl Who Cried Pearls won), cinematography (Sinners won), documentary feature (Mr Nobody Against Putin won) and casting (One Battle After Another won). The faves in those categories were Two People Exchanging Saliva, Butterflies, One Battle After Another, The Perfect Neighbor and Sinners, respectively.
The tie, the first at the Academy Awards in 14 years, really made a mess of the live-action short category — thank goodness that was one of the smallest markets bet upon for the whole show.
How the tie paid out — or didn’t — depends on which predictions market you favor.
Kalshi actually offered bettors an option for an Oscars tie. For live-action short, the Tie choice was selected just 40 times with a total of $2,365 (of more than $440,000 wagered in the category) on the line — or less than $60 per bet. Still, if you had either Two People Exchanging Saliva or The Singers as an outright winner, you are probably pretty pissed to not see your initial wager returned. Read the print, people.
Even angrier today, probably, are Polymarket bettors who wagered on Two People Exchanging Saliva, the favorite in the category. Polymarket’s Oscars rules stipulated that in the event of a tie, the film whose “listed name comes first in alphabetical order” is treated as the winner, meaning those who bet on The Singers received payouts over Two People Exchanging Saliva. How incredibly arbitrary. (And how incredibly close, alphabetically).
Let the 98th Academy Awards serve as a reminder to only bet what you can afford to lose, and that these predictions markets should be played “for entertainment purposes only” — especially when betting on, well, entertainment.
