By Andrés Uribe, Expedition PR
The 85th annual Academy Awards might have ended Sunday night, but come Monday afternoon and the social media party continues to rage on. A quick peek at Twitter shows that five of the top ten trending topics are still Oscar related. Here are a few social media highlights from this year’s show.
The Tweet Mirror. In an attempt by The Academy to reach younger audiences, social media took front stage at this year’s award show. The red carpet television broadcast was littered with information about who would be tweeting, what they are tweeting on, and were to find their tweets. In several of the camera switches you could almost see commentators hitting the ‘tweet’ button on their phones twitter apps. Besides urging everyone to tweet, The Academy went a step further and gave fans a chance to see something they never previously had access to, the backstage prep room. The Academy teamed up with Twitter on this one to set up a “Twitter Mirror” that allowed celebrities to take photos of themselves backstage and instantly tweet them out through The Academy’s official Twitter account. Here’s one such picture of Jean Dujardin.
Red Carpet Mystery Box. Perhaps one of the less successful Twitter stunts this year was ABC’s red carpet “Mystery Box”. ABC featured a covered box next to the red carpet interview area and asked interviewees to guess what was in the box with the clue that it featured 2,000 separate components. Red carpet celebrities seemed as interested in the box as the Twitter audience was, with only 174 retweets on @TheAcademy’s post advertising the #OscarMystery. One notable response came from Bradley Cooper, who mumbled his guess of “A parrot” while walking off stage. The correct response was “Ruby Slippers” from “The Wizard of Oz”.
Onion tweet and apology. Still trending on Twitter Monday afternoon is 9-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis. Perhaps even more notable than her Oscar nomination and her preference for dog-shaped handbags , is the fact that her fan’s spurred the first ever apology from The Onion News for their offensive tweet aimed at Wallis. The tweet in question went out during the ceremony and was removed within an hour of going up. The Onion issued a formal apology over Facebook the following day. Mixed emotions continue to be expressed as new lines are being drawn over what is and isn’t acceptable within the realm of satirical news.
Overall though the Oscars were not the huge social media success that The Academy hoped it to be. A total of 8.9 million tweets were generated throughout the show, according to Twitter. This pales in comparison to the reported 24 million produced during the Super Bowl, and 14 million produced during the Grammys. With numbers like these, you can be sure that next year will feature something better than a “Mystery Box” gimmick to attract young people and entice social media conversations.