It’s like the traditional “pick-the-winners” Oscar pool—with a twist. Rather than simply picking which film you think will win each award, you can spread out your risk by distributing 10 points among the nominees in each award category. (Or, go “all-in” by wagering 10 points on a sure winner.) Your picks are stored online, and as the Oscar winners are announced, you win the points you wagered on the winning nominee and lose the rest of the points from that category.

Return to this site on Oscar Night, and you’ll have access to an online scoreboard which will track your progress throughout the entire live ceremony. And if you join or host an Oscar Party, you can also see your friends’ scores and compete for bragging rights (or cash—but onebee doesn’t condone gambling, shame on you!).

Download the PDF example scoreboard to get an idea of what’s in store.

It’s not to harvest your email address for spammers nor invade your privacy. (Promise!) Your Oscar pool picks will be associated with your account, enabling you to return and modify them without anyone else having access. If this is your first time playing the onebee.com Oscar pool, you may not think secrecy is all that important. You might even think, “Why would I want to return and modify my picks??” But you’ll learn. Oh, you’ll learn…

If you have more questions about how onebee.com accounts work, peruse the Privacy Policy or get in touch by email.

An Oscar Party is a way to share your Oscar Night scoreboard with a group of others. Whether you watch the show together or separately, everyone who’s joined the same Oscar Party will see the same online scoreboard and watch as their points are automatically tallied.

The onebee.com Oscar Pool will track your score whether you join an Oscar Party or not, but it’s usually more fun to compete in a group.

You can join as many Oscar Parties as you like, but you’ll be asked to choose one as your “primary” party, since realistically you can only view one scoreboard at a time during Oscar Night. You can change your primary party – or any decision about your party membership – as often as you like.

As I get older, busier, and considerably less interested in the broadcast or its nominees, the task of prepping the database and laying out the printable ballot sometimes gets procrastinated a bit. But rest assured we’ll be ready in time for Oscar Night. The closest we’ve ever come is the day before the broadcast, but lately it’s more like a week.

First of all: no personal information is ever shared. In accordance with the Privacy Policy, your consent is required for any information to be shared, and in some cases the aggregated voting patterns of all Oscar Pool users can be valuable in studying trends and strategies.

If and when such information is requested, your completely anonymized wagers on each nominee will be collected along with the wagers of other users who have opted in, and this pool of data will be shared for further analysis. The only data shared will be the number of points wagered on each nominee and a completely random number which will serve to link your wagers from one Oscar year to another (but which cannot be used to identify you in any way). If you haven’t opted in, or if you haven’t submitted any wagers to an Oscar Pool, no information will be shared.

You can opt in to share this information when you create your onebee.com account, and you can change your selection as often as you like on the Information Sharing page. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

There’s an overlong, esoteric, and very silly recap of its history here: Oscar Time. Be prepared for some lengthy tangents that are unnecessarily spiteful toward the Lord of the Rings movies.

More often than you might think. Sometimes I ask them of myself. Life is a journey of constant discovery.

Drop us a line at beehive@onebee.com and we’ll answer it lickety-quick.