This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/03/ellen-degeneres-selfie-for-the-win-oscars-memes
The article has changed 5 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Version 1 | Version 2 |
---|---|
Ellen's selfie for the win: the Oscars are must-meme TV and Hollywood knows it | Ellen's selfie for the win: the Oscars are must-meme TV and Hollywood knows it |
(6 months later) | |
After an arduous campaign resulted in his 2012 re-election, Barack Obama thanked his supporters with an inspirational tweet: “Four more years”. The “humblebrag” earned Obama a massive 781,436 retweets – a record high for Twitter. The president was a officially a man of the internet people, a new standard for those who matter. No wonder the Academy Awards chased the same epic goal. | |
Last night, of course, and on purpose, Ellen Degeneres obliterated the hug RT’d ’round the world by tweeting a photo straight from the aisle at the Oscars. Brad Pitt, Angelina, Jolie, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Channing Tatum, Bradley Cooper, Jared Leto and Lupita Nyong’o, fresh off her Best Supporting Actress win: they all crammed into Degeneres’s “selfie” – that 21st-century reduction of self-portraiture that’s both groan-worthy and essential to befriending the Twitter masses. Half an hour and a couple hundred thousand retweets later, Obama’s record had been shattered and the internet was more or less upside-down. | |
“So?” says the grump waiting on the telecast’s Nielsen ratings to publish from a dusty dot matrix printer. | |
So, behold: the Oscars just earned bank in the form of internet culture’s greatest currency. No, not Bitcoin. | |
Each year, producers, filmmakers, media pundits and loud-mouthed audience members damn the Academy Awards for being a show that serves absolutely no one. The ceremony is too long, the Best Picture nominees are too “art house”, the host is too mean/too crass/too gentle/too stuck-up the asses of the celebrities he or she is supposed to be skewering. The Oscars are pointless. | |
So pointless, in fact, that nearly a million people anxiously waited for said host – too plugged-in, it turned out, and not in a trolly way – to post a picture on the internet. Those were nearly a million people (now 2.6 million people, and counting) who were already glued to their television screens, watching live, embracing the Oscars as must-watch TV. And you can bet they were the young people who everyone’s certain only care about superhero movies. | |
Oscar producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron came prepared to strike Internet gold this year. Sure, ratings were up in 2013, but backlash deemed that a flub: host Seth MacFarlane antagonized audiences with comedy “bits”, while Internet target number one Anne Hathaway was front and center in Les Misérables tributes, and the ceremony’s undeniably GIF-worthy moment – a one-second loop to be shared across Tumblr blogs for all eternity – was the schadenfreude pratfall of America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Lawrence. To be sure, 2014 would be an uphill battle to win back respect. | |
Zadan and Meron knew theatrical showstoppers, knew spectacle of the Hollywood “golden age” ilk, but they didn’t know how to appeal to the Internet-savvy, an ironic and silly bunch that still savors the celebratory they’re-just-like-us vibe of the Oscars, that still influence a show’s lasting impact as much as Us Weekly readers pack a supermarket checkout line. | |
The producers must have learned a thing or two from their tremendous hit, Sound of Music Live!, a true TV event that remained faithful to the musical’s spirit while winking an eye at its own stupidity. Their live musicaldemanded “live-tweeting” from on-lookers, dropping in hashtags, flooding YouTube with short promos, and promising an “Is this really happening?” level of camp. Likewise, last night’s Oscars weren’t waiting for the web to meme-ify – the show flipped the switches, provoked the stars in their midst, prefabbed the GIFs and spelled out the hashtags. And it all worked, for once. | |
Ellen’s built-in Twitter appeal didn’t hurt, but the group photo was only the beginning. Dishing out pizza to Hollywood’s absolute A-list and watching them scarf it down in tuxedos and ballgowns? That’s the kind of oddball stunt concocted in the trenches of Reddit. (Macaulay Culkin actually pulled the same move last December.) At one point, Ellen popped out from behind Leonardo DiCaprio – controlled chaos frozen in time, prepared especially for the now image-heavy Twitter. | |
The rest of the show fed off Ellen’s meme energy. A noticeable extension of the acceptance speech time limits paved the way for inspirational quotes (to be inevitably plastered, LOLcat-style, over telecast screencaps in the AM) and snippets of social fun, like Cate Blanchett and Julia Roberts’s hashtag in-joke “#SuckIt”. It didn’t hurt that seats were assigned to maximize internet darlings: sprinkled throughout the selfie participants were Benedict Cumberbatch (overlord of the Cumberbitches), the object of the web’s affection, Michael Fassbender, and Matthew McConaughey, who spouted his own viral catchphrase, “All right, all right, all right”, during his acceptance speech. | |
Forget if the Academy Awards “gets it right” or not – this is an awards show that’s evolving in the right direction. It is a telecast for an Academy sporting members like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lena Dunham and Milla Jovovich, who use social media to interact directly with their fans and use it well. If the Oscars want a legitimate audience down the road – 2.6 million and many, many more watching live, plugged-in and laughing with the audience – then siphoning Twitter followers is a must. Making a tweet count is a thankless task, but it’s not impossible. There’s a middle ground between rigid rituals filled with overly written banter … and factory-manufactured, legitimately buzzworthy skits. The 2014 Academy Awards figured out how to juggle both and reap the retweets: let the stars loose. #NoJoke. | |