Nate Silver, bored silly when there's no race for dogcatcher to handicap, falls victim to Columnist's Disease: The need to say something,
anything, at regular intervals when there's nothing to say, lest the reader think you've died.
Oscar Predictions, Election-StyleQuote:
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 — something that looks like a contender in the abstract, but which isn’t picking up much support from actual voters — we should be skeptical that it would suddenly turn things around.