Real Life Weirdness: Cross-Eyed Opossum To Predict Oscars

Playing on the world's adoration of cute animals, ABC has reportedly hired a famous cross-eyed opossum named Heidi to pick the winners of the Oscars on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Seriously. The opossum is a Facebook and YouTube sensation and the producers are obviously trying to duplicate the success Germany had when Paul the Octopus successfully picked several games during the 2010 World Cup. However, that octopus had a 50/50 chance of picking the winners. Heidi has only a 10% chance of picking Best Picture. Read more about this stunt, and the opossum, after the break.

According to the BBC (with a heads up from /Film reader Sam S), this will all go down on Oscar night on ABC as part of their surely long Oscar-preshow. The opossum won't be in Hollywood, however, they'll film the segment in Germany and just air it on Jimmy Kimmel.

Here's my prediction about how Heidi will do on her Oscar predictions: zero correct. There are so many inherent problems with this stunt, it's ridiculous. Picking a soccer game is much easier for an animal because there are only two teams and, hypothetically, either team has a chance to win because the outcome isn't set. The Oscars involve so many more politics that it's basically impossible for certain nominees to win. But the opossum doesn't know this. It's going to walk around and pick something like The Fighter for Best Picture. And while that might win Best Picture at the David Chen awards, it has no shot on Oscar night. Still, I'm sure it's going to be cute and fun and kill five minutes of TV time. But – seriously – this is a little dumb.

What's more interesting is the opossum herself, which has nothing to do with movies. So, instead of talking all about how was born in the United States but grew up in Germany and gained notoriety when a photo ran in a newspaper, we'll just link to this YouTube news story. There are TONS of others on there too.

Are you looking forward to this segment? Do you think Heidi has just as good a chance of picking the Shorts nominees as the rest of us?