If Robert Downey, Jr. walks up to receive his Oscar on Sunday night for best supporting actor in the movie Tropic Thunder, not as many people will be as astonished as you would think. This and other surprises around who the Oscar should really go to are part of Networked Insights’ latest Measure the Social Report. We used our ability to measure social interactions to reveal the true fan favorites for this year’s Academy Awards.

Many will gather around the TV Sunday night to watch stars come down the red carpet and to see who walks away with an Academy Award. But millions have already been online reading, blogging, sharing, linking and rating stories that feature the Oscar nominees they support. And according to our ability to measure across the entire social universe, these people are the true predictor of who’s cheering for who when Hugh Jackman steps on stage to kick things off this Sunday.

Our report released today titled Oscars: Measuring the Social, captures all the online buzz of the Oscars to predict which movie the public will be cheering for on Oscar night.

The entire concept of the Oscars is to build hype in order to sell movie tickets during a generally slow season. Bringing that buzz online through word of mouth is a huge benefit to the movie industry. Networked Insights has the ability to quantify that buzz whereby you can correlate the ROI of online interactions to ticket sales.

We ranked the top Oscar social winners in the most popular categories. And the ‘true’ winners are:

To gather data for this Measuring the Social Report, we tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which included 3.5 million conversations per day and over 120 million unique users.

While the highlights from the Oscars: Measuring the Social report may not appear to reveal too many surprises, the interesting thing is how close, or not so close, the level of engagement is among fans. For instance, Heath Ledger, who many predictors are calling a ‘clear favorite to win best supporting actor,’ is only up three percentage points over Robert Downey Jr., based on total online engagement.

And while many are predicting Kate Winslett to be the winner in the best actress category, total online engagement shows Meryl Streep as the fan favorite.

What’s always surprising to people about our social media measurement approach is how different the results often are versus traditional monitoring and measurement. That’s because traditional approaches to measurement, even social media, lack relevance. For instance, other social media measurement only accounts for posts while ours factors in content that is posted, read, linked to, shared and rated. When you consider that conversations are happening online today, it only makes sense that ‘true’ online engagement is captured and utilized.