In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. In other words, which of the nominated films was downloaded the most on BitTorrent.

After crunching the numbers, taken from thousands of publicly available torrents, this awards race turned out to be an easy win for Inception. With a staggering 13,780,000 downloads Christopher Nolan’s movie was the clear winner.

The runners up for Best Picture based on the number of downloads are The Social Network and Toy Story 3 with 8,630,000 and 6,620,000 downloads respectively. Although these numbers are interesting, we have to note that the comparison is affected by release dates. Not all of the nominated films were released on BitTorrent at the same time, resulting in a bias towards older releases.

That said, there is a strong indication that Inception would remain the favored Oscar nominee among BitTorrent users if they were allowed to vote for a movie.

BitTorrent indexer BTarena has been running an Oscar poll for the last three years where visitors can vote for their Oscar favorites across various categories. In this poll, which went live just a few days ago, Inception is also in the lead with 33 percent, followed by 127 Hours and Toy Story with 12 percent each.

Aside from picking the Best Picture, BTarena visitors can also pick their favorites in the other categories. Currently, James Franco (127 Hours) is leading the Best Actor category while Natalie Portman (Black Swan) is leading as the Best Actress with half of all votes.

The founder of BTarena told TorrentFreak that he decided to start the Oscar torrents project after the OscarTorrents site went down in 2007. “Oscar winners should be voted on BitTorrent too, right? Not only by a few Hollywood people,” he said.

The big question, however, is what all these downloads and votes are actually worth. Except for the bragging rights, they seem to hold little predictive value.

Last year, half of the voting visitors of BTarena chose Avatar as their favorite, while the Academy members picked The Hurt Locker. In terms of downloads District 9 was the big winner on BitTorrent in 2010, so Nolan and the Inception crew shouldn’t get too excited.

In terms of Box Office revenue Inception has little to complain about though. With $823,576,195 in worldwide revenues the millions of downloads on BitTorrent didn’t get in the way of a healthy profit.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The statistics for all 2011 nominees, excluding the documentary and foreign films categories, show that 20 of the 29 films are now available on BitTorrent in DVD quality. More than half of the films have leaked as a screener and 7 of those are estimated to be leaked by Academy members.

Despite the widespread availability of these high-profile movie titles, the overall trend is that fewer high quality copies leak every year. In common with last year, the number of screener copies that surfaced online has been reduced – 38% of the all the nominated films, down from the record low of 41% this time last year.

If retail DVDs are thrown into the mix we find that 66% of the films are now available in high quality format, down from 79% around the same time last year. Interesting statistics, which are obviously welcomed by the MPAA and other Hollywood players.

Another statistic that stands out is the average time between the theatrical release in the US and the leak of the film online. This average wait time (including CAM releases) has gone up to 37 days this year, the longest wait since Baio started tracking these statistics in 2003.

It has to be noted though, that the 37 days average is a skewed picture and most leaks come out much quicker. The median leak time is only 17 days, but the average waiting time is pushed up by three movie titles for which the pirating audience had to wait for more than 100 days.

Finally, we want to draw attention to some statistics which showing that availability and box office success don’t always lead to high piracy rates.

Toy Story 3, the most successful film at the box office last year, was available in a high quality copy on BitTorrent just a day after its premiere. All the ingredients for an unprecedented number of illegal downloads were there, but somehow it didn’t even make it into the list of 2010′s most downloaded movies.

Also, this year, Rabbit Hole was only one film for which the first screener leak came out before the theatrical release last December. Despite this unfortunate timing, the film has been downloaded by only a few thousand people in the past several weeks, trailing dozens of other films in terms of popularity.

Despite the lack of a high correlation between early availability, box office revenues and piracy, the movie industry continues to worry about piracy and the losses it may generate. Given that overall movie piracy is still on the rise, we expect that both measures against torrent sites and screener leaks will be intensified throughout 2011.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.