The Oscars were cut shorter this year, which is always good, and many AGM’s could learn from that as well, but in some respects they lack excitement. Bookies seldom pay out huge payouts to people predicting the winners of these events and one merely needed to go to their sites to know all the major winners before the event was held. For example, The King’s Speech was a hot favourite at 1/10 to win best picture, Natalie Portman was at 1/60 to win the best actress award and Colin Firth had similar odds to win the best actor award.
For those who don’t understand betting, effectively for every R100,00 you bet, you would win about R2,00 on those two categories and about R10,00 on the best movie category. In other words, short of a nuclear bomb hitting the venue, you already knew all three of those categories and there were other categories with even shorter favourites!

At the end of the day it is probably not that hard for somebody who has to pay out money based on the result to do a bit of a poll of those who have a vote, and to realise that somebody is romping away with that category, but it loses all its excitement when you know two weeks beforehand exactly who is going to win each category, even if the media tries to hype it up, and makes it seem as if it is a battle between X and Y – the betting sites are telling you that there is no battle at all and there is a clear winner.