Main      Site Guide    
The Studio Movie Trading Game

Congratulations -- you're a movie studio! Now buy and sell movies to try to win the awards race. In this game, your task is to buy and sell movies competing in this year's awards season. Every time a movie you "own" gets a real-life nomination or win from the Oscars, the Golden Globes, or some other prominent awards body, you get points. Trade movies as the season progresses to try to come out on top!

What This Game Is and How To Play It

In The Studio Movie Trading Game, you can acquire up to 8 of this year's movies, trade them for others at any time, and earn points whenever one of your movies wins nominations or awards during this year's awards season. At the end of the awards season, the player with the most points wins.

To play, all you have to do is login and acquire some movies. To maximize your score, login between awards events and change your selections based on how well certain movies seem to be doing overall and/or what awards events are forthcoming. For example, if the Annies (awards for animation) are coming up, you might want to change your selections to animated movies, then change them back when the Annies are over. See the How the Scoring Works section below for further details about timing.

What Are the Events?

Click on the Event Schedule tab to see the full list of events for this season. Some of them may not be assigned dates yet. Different events offer different scoring opportunities. Some events are worth more than other events, and even within the same event some categories may score more than other categories. Review the Event Schedule tab to see which awards score and how much they're worth.

Short film and documentary film categories do not score for any event. (Short and documentary films may score if they earn nominations or wins in a broader category, but categories dedicated to short or documentary films do not score.) This is not because these films aren't worthy; it's merely that removing them from consideration makes this game more accessible to play, as predicting short film and documentary film awards tends to be very difficult, and often the likely candidates are not possible to see by the average viewer before the awards season is long over.

One thing to note is that a film being nominated for something scores the same number of points it will score if it wins. For example, if the Screen Actor's Guild's Best Ensemble award scores each of its nominees 3 points, the winning film will score an additional 3 points. Some awards bodies, such as the New York Film Critics Circle, do not announce nominees. In these cases, the winning films score double, equivalent to a film scoring once for being nominated and again for winning.

How the Scoring Works

To earn points when a film wins or is nominated for an award, you must own that film on the day prior to the date of the awards event. Specifically, you must own the winning film before midnight PST on the night before the awards date. During the day of an awards event, you may freely trade in your movies for others in preparation for some future awards event, even if the current day's event's results have not yet been announced.

For example, let's say the Golden Globes take place on April 2 and the Oscars take place on April 3. Acquire the movies you think will score best at the Globes by April 1. On the morning of April 2, you can trade movies based on what you think will score best at the Oscars. When the Globes are announced and scored on the evening of April 2, they will be scored against what you held at the end of April 1, even if you now own different movies. Then, on April 3, the Oscars will be scored based on what you owned at the end of April 2.

A Word About Strategy

Some people decline to participate in awards predictions games like this and The Academy Awards Predictions Game because they haven't seen the films likely to be nominated. In fact, this doesn't help much. Some people even feel that seeing the films clouds one's ability to predict the awards, because they are influenced by their own personal experiences with the films instead of by how the industry as a whole is receiving them.

Plus, it's helpful to recognize that the different awards bodies that score for this game often exhibit a herd mentality. That is, if a particular movie does well in some of the early awards, there's a good chance it'll do well in later awards. So even if your initial picks are far off, you can course correct as the awards season unfolds.