2009 was not exactly one of the Academy Awards Pool's shining moments.

Though a great competition, 2009 was marred by a host of technical glitches including a broken website, online submission form that appeared to be working but was not, an emergency server migration along with all of the accompanying DNS issues two days before the show, and reversed headers on the picks spreadsheet, resulting in the announcement of winners who hadn't actually won and a subsequent correction.

While Dom momentarily took leave of his technical savvy, however, the entrants were sharp as a tack, posting  the highest average score as a percentage of the total potential of any year ever... even including the Lord of the Rings sweep in 2004!  (Though the average score for the two years was the same, there were five Best Song nominees in 2004 rather than three, making a perfect ticket one point higher.)  Newcomer Emily Shrift took first place, posting the fourth-highest score in the history of the pool, while regular moneywinner Michael Fang took second, edging another newcomer, Jackie Khoo, on the number of categories correctly predicted.

When it came to individual categories, Sean Penn for Best Actor was the biggest surprise in the major categories, correctly predicted by only 29% of the entries, most of which thought Mickey Rourke's comeback story would be capped with a statuette.  The biggest surprise of the night, however, was "Departures" for Foreign Language Film, correctly predicted only by Michael Fang and Andrea & Dave Chen.  On the flipside, though "Slumdog Millionaire" for Best Picture and Heath Ledger for Best Supporting Actor pulled down 89% of the pool's predictions, the least surprising win was actually "WALL-E" for Best Animated Feature, which was missed only by Mija Coit. 

The tiebreaker turned out to be a pretty good one, even if the entire field except for Brian Gallagher underestimated just how much time Hugh Jackman would spend singing and dancing, and in an odd bit of synchronicity, three people guessed he'd do so for seventeen seconds.. Even so, the tiebreaker was barely used, and the only tied score among the top three was broken with number of categories correctly predicted, without having to go to the tiebreaker question.

Consensus seemed to be that it was a great competition and an unusually good ceremony.  Sadly, it was the pool's organizers who dropped the ball in 2009.