Why 'La bola negra' could make Oscar history: what the historical data says

Is this possible or is it all just the result of domestic hype? Here's what the data and precedents from recent years suggest.

Until 2009, the Academy nominated just five films for Best Picture, and the film with the most votes won. That year, the Academy expanded the shortlist to ten films, with some editions featuring nine, but the most significant change concerned the voting system: the Academy introduced preferential voting. Rather than simply choosing their favourite, voters rank the nominated films in order of preference, marking their top choice with a 1, their second choice with a 2 and so on.

Instead of simply voting for their favourite, Academy members now rank the nominated films in order of preference, placing a 1 next to their favourite, a 2 next to the next one and so on.

It is not a points system: coming in second on a ballot does not automatically provide a certain number of votes. The count starts with first preferences. If one film receives more than 50 per cent of the votes, it wins outright.

If no film reaches that threshold, the count proceeds through successive rounds. Officials eliminate the film with the fewest first-place votes, then transfer those ballots to the next-ranked film still in contention. They repeat the process until one film secures more than 50 per cent of the vote.

The system rewards not only the film that inspires the greatest enthusiasm, but also the one that achieves the broadest consensus. A film might attract a huge number of first-place votes but also provoke strong opposition among other voters. Another might receive fewer top rankings yet consistently appear second or third on ballots, eventually winning through successive rounds of redistribution.

La bola negra has followed a highly unusual path in the Oscar race. As of late September, an analysis of the 17 complete awards seasons since then points to three particularly interesting early indicators: winning a major European film festival award, finishing in the top three of Toronto's audience award and appearing among the leading contenders in major Oscar predictions immediately after the September festivals.

Each indicator has a different predictive value on its own. Taken together, however, they dramatically narrow the field of historical comparisons. With that in mind, let us look at the figures and the reasons behind them.

La bola negra won a major award at Cannes. The festival enjoys enormous prestige, but a Cannes prize alone offers no guarantee of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Looking at the Palme d'Or, Grand Prix, Jury Prize and Best Director award since 2009, most of the films that won one of these honours never went on to compete for the Academy's top prize.

What changes the historical picture dramatically is what happened four months later.

Toronto tells a different story. Its People's Choice Award, voted for by audiences, has become one of the most consistent early indicators of Oscar success.

Of the 17 films that won the award between 2009 and 2025, 15 went on to receive Best Picture Oscar nomination (88.2 per cent). Four of them (The King's Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book and Nomadland) also won the Oscar itself.

If we widen the picture to include films that did not win Toronto's audience award but finished in the top three, we find future Best Picture winners such as Argo, Spotlight, Parasite and Anora.

In total, eight of the 17 Best Picture Oscar winners during the period under study had previously finished on Toronto's audience-award podium. That is almost one in two.

The figures become even more striking when we combine Toronto with Cannes.

Since 2009, before La bola negra, only three films had won one of the four Cannes awards under consideration and then finished in Toronto's top three in the same awards season. They were Parasite, which won the Palme d'Or and came third in Toronto in 2019; Emilia Pérez, which won the Jury Prize and finished second in Toronto in 2024; and Anora, which won the Palme d'Or and came third that same year.

All three subsequently received Best Picture Oscar nominations. Two of them, Parasite and Anora, won the award.

The sample is too small to turn that two-out-of-three result into a meaningful 66.7 per cent probability. However, the fact that all three earned nominations shows just how small and successful this group has been.

There is also one crucial difference: none of those three films won Toronto's audience award.

La bola negra is the first film since the Academy expanded the Best Picture shortlist in 2009 to combine one of the four Cannes honours under consideration with a subsequent People's Choice Award victory in Toronto. Parasite and Anora finished third in Toronto, while Emilia Pérez came second.

The closest comparison therefore lies outside Cannes. In 2020, Nomadland won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and, just days later, claimed Toronto’s People's Choice Award. By the end of September, it had established itself among the leading contenders in Oscar predictions. It went on to earn a nomination and ultimately win Best Picture.

It remains the only Best Picture winner in the period under study to combine a major European festival victory, a Toronto win and broad support from critics and industry experts in September, just as La bola negra has done.

The third indicator is essential because September predictions are far from infallible on their own.

For this analysis, we have selected three leading sources of Oscar predictions: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Next Best Picture.

A reconstruction of their predictions over the years reveals a long list of early favourites that ultimately missed out on a Best Picture nomination. They include Foxcatcher and Interstellar in 2014; Carol and Steve Jobs in 2015; Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and The Birth of a Nation in 2016; First Man in 2018; Babylon and The Whale in 2022; The Color Purple in 2023; and Blitz in 2024.

The 2016 race offers a particularly striking example. In September, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk received backing from 93 per cent of respondents in an AwardsWatch predictions poll, yet it ultimately failed to secure a Best Picture nomination. Moonlight, which would go on to win the Oscar, had just 44 per cent support at that point.

Being among the favourites in September matters, but it is far from a guarantee.

La bola negra, however, does not rely on this third indicator alone. Following its Toronto success, it appears among the contenders in predictions from both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. In Next Best Picture's September aggregate, all 17 predictors include it among their ten Best Picture contenders. In fact, nine of those 17 experts predict that it will win, compared with eight who back The Odyssey.

In other words, this is not a film that festival juries have rewarded while specialists remain unconvinced about its chances. All three indicators (festivals, audiences and critics) currently point in the same direction.

When we look for films that combine all three conditions (a major Cannes or Venice award, a top-three finish in Toronto and strong support from Oscar predictors in September) we find very few examples.

Parasite met all three criteria and won the Oscar. Nomadland did the same and also won. Emilia Pérez met all three and received a nomination, while Anora met them and went on to win.

Before La bola negra, therefore, all four comparable films received Best Picture nominations, and three of the four won.

Once again, a 75 per cent win rate across a sample of just four films cannot serve as a mathematical probability for the Spanish film. The more significant point is that, among the precedents examined, no film that reached the end of September with this combination of indicators subsequently missed out on a nomination.

Looking at the evidence from the opposite direction makes the pattern even clearer. Dozens of Cannes winners failed to secure Oscar nominations. Some September favourites disappeared from the race, and Toronto has produced exceptions too.

But these indicators tend to mislead when the other signals fail to support them. What makes La bola negra unusual is that, in just four months, it has impressed three entirely different groups: an international jury at Cannes, thousands of audience members in Toronto and the specialists who follow awards season professionally.

Nothing obliges Academy voters to agree with any of these groups. Nevertheless, the convergence of their views considerably reduces the number of historical films that offer a meaningful comparison.

By late September, the data supports a firmer conclusion about a Best Picture nomination than about an outright win.

Winning the Oscar remains extraordinarily difficult. Films that looked like favourites at this stage, from La La Land to The Fabelmans, ultimately lost, while titles that initially lagged behind, such as CODA, gained momentum over the winter.

The case for a Best Picture nomination looks considerably stronger from a historical perspective. La bola negra has won a major award at Cannes, claimed Toronto's audience prize and secured the backing of leading Oscar predictors. All four previous films that combined comparable versions of these three indicators went on to receive nominations.

The awards season has barely begun, and several indicators could still reshape the rankings: the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Baftas, followed in particular by the PGA, DGA and Sag awards, which recognise achievement among producers, directors and actors respectively.

Even so, the September picture supports a conclusion that would have been much harder to defend with data just four months ago: La bola negra's path to a Best Picture nomination would not represent a historical anomaly. At this stage, the anomaly would be for a film with such a strong combination of indicators to fail to reach the shortlist.

Explore the SUR in English culture and arts archive