How Did Neil Patrick Harris Predict The Oscars? - 5 Possible Solutions To His Magic Trick

5. He Guessed (And Used Plants In The Audience)

The officially given explanation is that Neil Patrick Harris guessed what was going to happen on the ceremony night and there's a every possibility that's exactly what he did. Of course, his predications were so specific that the accumulated odds of getting them all right were even higher than those for guessing all awards, but there's nothing to suggest Harris didn't engineer the ceremony so that all of these events would happen. The opening number had a few cheeky celebrity plants (Benedict Cumberbatch swigging from a hipflask was the most gif-tacular), so it's not too much of a leap that he'd have used a similar tactic for his showstopper. The recent confirmation that John Travolta creeping on Idina Menzel was all rehearsed adds fuel to this - clearly the ceremony was less spontaneous than it initially seemed. Even the more out-there guesses can be accommodated in this theory. All of the awards-related predictions involved the favourites in those categories, meaning Harris was really only making a very safe bet; he assumed, for example, J. K. Simmons would win Best Adapted Screenplay and asked the actor what he had planned in his acceptance speech ahead of time. That'd also explain why the band so easily gave up trying to play Pawe‚ Pawlikowski off. Even with the dependable predictability of the Oscars, there is still the risk that certain things wouldn't fall into place, however, but maybe that eventuality was prepared for too...