On Sunday night, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong’o and Angelina Jolie squeezed together for one of the Internet’s most epic selfies. And not only was it a great moment to showcase beauty at the Oscars, it was quite a milestone for Twitter as well.
Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres gathered some of the beautiful people of Hollywood in the middle of the telecast to break a record with the most retweets of a photo. Starting by approaching Meryl Streep, she then enlisted some nearby stars to join in, with Bradley Cooper taking the group’s photo.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
Within minutes, her tweet garnered almost 1 million retweets and 300,000 favorites. By Monday, that number was closer to 2.8 million retweets and 1.5 million favorites. Twitter seemed to struggle with the photo’s popularity, as it went down shortly after the tweet went live. The site later congratulated the host on her milestone, tweeting “The envelope please … to @TheEllenShow—this is now the most retweeted tweet with over 1 million RTs. Congrats!” Throughout the show, Twitter saw more than 11 million Oscar-related tweets (a 75% increase from last year).
ABC’s Oscars show also hit ratings highs, with the 86th Academy Awards getting the best ratings in 10 years with more than 43 million viewers, up from last year’s Seth MacFarlane-hosted show, which was seen by 40 million.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live: After The Oscars,” ABC’s other big event for the night, was also up for its best ever ratings at nearly 7 million viewers. The host had his usual star-studded cast, this time taking YouTube hits and turning them into Oscar-worthy performances.
Read more at Los Angeles Times.
Brief Take: Not only was this Twitter gold for the Oscar telecast, but also for sponsor Samsung, which was given a lot of airtime thanks to Ellen’s use of her Galaxy throughout the night.
[Image courtesy of ABC]
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