Golden Globes Preview & Odds - Best Motion Picture - 2010

The Golden Globes which are scheduled one week from now can be traded and speculated on at the Intrade Prediction Market. The Daily Chuck will do a preview on a couple of awards in the next week in anticipation of the awards. Today, we will be looking at the Best Motion Picture category which The Golden Globes differ from the Oscars in one major way. They have two categories for Best Motion Picture, those that qualify as a Drama and those qualifying as a Comedy or Musical.

Best Motion Picture - Drama; The Favorite - Up in the Air; The Dark Horse - Avatar

For Best Drama, Up in the Air seems to be the heavy favorite despite the tremendous box office success and popularity of Avatar. The movie Up in the Air; starring George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who travels around the country firing people, is a good movie in the sense that it captures the mood of the country in the economic mess that we are currently in. It seemed a little too long and boring for my tastes, but had some really good moments. Personally, I liked the Hurt Locker more but I can understand why Up in the Air is the favorite. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is the group that decides the Golden Globes and they like to vote for movies with star power and a message. According to bettors on Intrade Inglorious Basterds and Precious don’t have much of a chance.

Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical; The Favorite - Nine; The Dark Horse - 500 Days of Summer

For Best Comedy or Musical, Nine continues to the favorite in a category of relatively light weights. Nine has been a commercial bomb and has not received very good reviews. It has a 30% score according to the Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes. This is the type of demographic that the HFPA is apart of and I think it shows the weakness of Nine in this category. Despite this, there doesn’t seem to be a movie that can compete to Nine in this category. It’s Complicated is funny but Meryl Streep has two movies in this category and votes for her might be split. The HFPA would never vote for The Hangover despite the fact that it is easily the funniest movie of the year. 500 Days of Summer at least made a profit and was commercially successful but may not be well known enough in this category to win. One interesting note about this market is the volume for 500 Days of Summer. At 214 it has traded more contracts than any other in the market. Maybe some traders are considering it a bargain?