Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,” from the movie “Trolls,” has been celebrated by fans since it debuted last May, when it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 en route to becoming the top-selling U.S. single of the year. Now, Timberlake hopes for one more honor: best original song at the Academy Awards.

Will the song’s soaring popularity lead to an Oscar? Does it help Timberlake’s cause that his tune was featured in an animated, musical film? That is, when choosing best song, does the academy have a preference for fan favorites, or a bias against certain film genres? To answer these questions, let’s examine the numbers behind the musical numbers.

The first question is about the significance of being popular. Intuitively, we know popularity probably counts for something: Ever since 1935, when the academy handed out the first statuette for best original song, it has frequently bestowed the honor on crowd-pleasers, whether it was “Over the Rainbow” (from “The Wizard of Oz”), “My Heart Will Go On” (“Titanic”) or “Skyfall” (from the film of the same name).

Let’s use the number of views a song has on YouTube as a proxy for popularity. Using data for movies released since 1990 — a sufficiently large sample size to draw meaningful conclusions — the song nominee with the greatest YouTube popularity has taken home the trophy 46 percent of the time, from “Streets of Philadelphia” (for the 1993 movie “Philadelphia”) to “Let It Go” (“Frozen,” 2013). By way of comparison, if we were to randomly pick one nominee from each year, basic probability tells us that our random selections would match the winner in only 23 percent of the years.

Still, this analysis leaves something to be desired. YouTube did not exist until 2005, and while the more popular songs from yesteryear do have more views than their lesser-known contemporaries, it’s not quite fair to compare counts for 1990s songs with those of today. And in the years when the most-watched video did not win the Oscar, we need to make a distinction between the times when the second-most-viewed video won (like 1999, the year the “Prince of Egypt” song “When You Believe,” which has fewer YouTube views than the “Armageddon” song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” took the prize) and when the least-watched video won (as in 2011, the year “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3” triumphed).

To address these issues, let’s assign a YouTube score to each nominee that is unbiased by the competitiveness of the year in which the song was nominated. For the numerically inclined, the score is derived from the song’s YouTube views divided by the average number of YouTube views for all of that year’s best-song nominees. Take 2012, when there were only two nominees: the scores are 1.57 for “Man or Muppet” (from “The Muppets”) and 0.43 for “Real in Rio” from “Rio.”

Now let’s use a logistic regression — a statistical tool that calculates how a change in some measurement makes another event more or less likely to happen — to determine the relationship between our YouTube scores and the Oscar results. The verdict: While the relationship is not strong, there is a positive correlation between YouTube views and Oscar wins. Songs with a score of less than 1 have less than a 20 percent chance of winning, while songs with a score greater than 4 have at least a 54 percent chance.

Popular songs are not the only tunes with an Oscar advantage. Since 1990, when a song from a musical is nominated, it has won 24 percent of the time, compared with 20 percent for songs from nonmusicals. So musicals provide a slight boost as well, but not a large enough one to draw any firm conclusions.

In the award’s early days, the advantage was more pronounced: All of the first 14 trophies in this category went to numbers from musicals, starting with “The Continental” (from the 1934 Astaire-Rogers film “The Gay Divorcee”) to “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (“Song of the South,” 1946). It wasn’t until “Buttons and Bows” (sung by Bob Hope in the 1948 comedy-western “The Paleface”) that a song from a nonmusical emerged victorious.

The academy also leans toward tunes from animated pictures, a tradition that goes back to the “Pinocchio” song “When You Wish Upon a Star” (1940). The advantage since 1990 of animation over live action (when toon-derived songs are nominated, they win 26 percent of the time) is larger than the corresponding gap for musicals, but it is still a relatively small distinction.

This year, contenders of all types are up for the award: YouTube sensations (“Can’t Stop the Feeling!” is quickly approaching 400 million views, while “How Far I’ll Go” from “Moana” has surpassed 60 million), songs from musicals (“Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” and “City of Stars” from “La La Land”), and selections from cartoons (both “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” and “How Far I’ll Go”). To round out the list, there is also a documentary nominee (“The Empty Chair” from “Jim: The James Foley Story”), which is trying to become the second documentary song ever to win this category (the first was Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up” from “An Inconvenient Truth”).

“Can’t Stop the Feeling!” seems to have it all — sky-high YouTube views and a musical film that’s animated. But before you check it off on your Oscar ballot, keep in mind that there are other factors at play. Perhaps the academy will look to make Lin-Manuel Miranda, who composed “How Far I’ll Go,” the youngest person to complete the hallowed EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony).

Or more likely, the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards will once again point the way in this category: They both honored “La La Land’s” “City of Stars.”

So when the envelope is opened in the city of stars, YouTube views and animation may not triumph, but a musical may once again reach the top of the movie song world.

© 2017 The New York Times Company