CUE Research · Study 9

Academy Award Winners

Every winner of an Oscar for acting or directing since 1929.

The question: Do the most celebrated performers and filmmakers share numbers, signs or birthdays?

What stands out

No clear differences. Across every group of 50 or more and every measure, the numbers are within what chance produces.

Worth watching, not enough to claim

  • Chinese sign

    Directors: Horse appears 14 times against about 6.4 expected (2.19×).

  • Chinese sign

    Actors: Ox appears 23 times against about 13.0 expected (1.77×).

  • Chinese sign

    Actresses: Dog appears 22 times against about 12.8 expected (1.72×).

  • Sun sign

    Actors: Aries appears 22 times against about 12.9 expected (1.71×).

  • Birth month

    Directors: Feb appears 12 times against about 5.9 expected (2.05×).

All winners: every birth quarter is within normal variation of random birthdays from the same years.

All winners Expected, random birthdays 1868–1999 Clear difference Worth watching

Context What explains it

Acting and directing have no age cut-off that would favour a birth month, so, like the Nobel laureates, this is a group where no pattern is expected.

Winners were born over more than a century, so each group’s baseline uses its own birth years.

Source The data

  • Academy Award winners: acting and directing. Retrieved 2026-09-27. View source
  • Every winner of Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, as recorded in Wikidata. People who won more than once are counted once.
  • Verification: 388 of 401 included. A winner is included when Wikidata records one birth date at day precision.
  • Expected values: every day of the years each group was born in, weighted by how many people were born in each year, run through CUE’s engine. Weighting matters for Chinese signs and Life Paths, which depend on the year.
  • A difference is called clear only in groups of 50 or more and at least three standard errors from expected. Because each study tests about a hundred values, a clear difference needs 3.5 standard errors; 2.5 to 3.5 is only “worth watching”.

Reproduce it: the raw data snapshots and build scripts are in CUE’s code repository (scripts/data and scripts/build-*-study.mts).

Further reading

  • Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ceremony records
  • Wikidata, award records