Without Ellen DeGeneres and her phone, the 87th Annual Academy Awards were a less tweeted-about affair than the 86th.
Nielsen Twitter ratings released Monday found that 13 million people saw tweets about the Oscars Sundaynight, down 6% from the previous year — a smaller drop-off than the ABC telecast of the ceremony experienced in total viewers (down 15%) or 18-49 ratings (down 17%).
But in total number of related tweets, Sunday’s telecast was down 47% at 5.9 million. That decline was likely due at least in part to the outsize impact in 2014 of host DeGeneres tweeting a star-studded selfie and declaring her intent to break a record for retweets. (She broke it.) Nielsen measured 203,000 Oscar-related tweets in the first minute following DeGeneres’ selfie alone. The picture was retweeted more than 3 million times.
Lady Gaga’s performance of songs from The Sound of Music was Sunday night’s most tweeted-about moment. Nielsen measured 574,504 Oscar tweets during the 15-minute period covering the performance, 11:15-11:30 p.m. Eastern. Canvs — a service by the company Mashwork that analyzes the emotional content of tweets captured by Nielsen — found that over the same period the performance drew more than 236,000 reactions on Twitter. According to Canvs, 60% of those reactions expressed “love.”
Julie Andrews’ appearance at the end of performance drew 21,366 reactions describing Andrews as “beautiful” or some equivalent.
The most hated moment was Birdman’s win for best picture, which drew 5,582 “hate” reactions between12:05 and 12:10 a.m. — not all of them for the film. While Birdman was mentioned in 26% of “hate” responses, presenter Sean Penn was mentioned in 18% of them.
John Travolta's appearance with Idini Menzel was dubbed by Canvs the "craziest moment," drawing, 19,315 reactions, 26% of which employed words such as "creepy," "weird" and "wtf."
