(Updated to reflect comment from Twitter)
There were many things to love about this year’s Oscars.
Ellen DeGeneres‘ pizza bit may have gone on a little too long, but I loved the loose atmosphere. There was also the noticable lack of “get the hell off the stage!” music, which resulted in fantastic, moving speeches from some of the nominees, especially Jared Leto and Lupito Nyong’o.
Plus, Pharrell Williams wore his awesome Grammy’s hat and also danced with Meryl Streep! So maybe all of my favorites didn’t win (Bruce Dern wuz robbed!) but all in all, it was a pretty great show.
What the telecast will most be remembered for, though, is the record-breaking celebrity-filled selfie that Ellen took toward the beginning of the show.
Stating that she wanted to break the record with the most retweets of a photo, DeGeneres first approached Streep, then got Julia Roberts and Channing Tatum involved. They were then joined by Nyong’o, Jared Leto, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradely Coooper, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
An hour later or so she got her wish, when the photo surpassed the previous record holder, none other than the President of the United States himself!
On November 7th, 2012, the night that Barack Obama was reelected he sent out a tweet of him hugging his wife that was retweeted over 600,000 times that night alone.
Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012
The photo eventually made its way all the to 781,509 retweets. (Interestingly, the number is going up againt tonight; are people trying to take back the record or something?)
Ellen’s selfie photo not only beat that photo’s record, it has tripled it. At the moment, the tweet has 2,325,07 retweets, and counting.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
The reference to Cooper’s arm length probably has to do with the fact that poor Jared Leto was almost completely cut out of the picture (and that is the extent of my sympathy for someone who just won a freakin Oscar!)
How popular was the photo? It might have actually crashed Twitter.
A little while later in the broadcast, Ellen came out and said she had “broken Twitter,” and reports are saying that the site was down for at least a few minutes following the taking of the picture.
So did the photo actually cause Twitter to go down or was it something else? A spokesperson simmply pointed me toward this brief blog post, which says:
“Between 19:05 and 19:29 PST today, some users may have experienced issues viewing and sending Tweets on twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile apps.
Traffic was redirected away from the components that were experiencing problems, and the issue has now been resolved.
We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Twitter had no other comment.
Either way, the Academy is taking credit for the outage:
Sorry, our bad. #Oscars pic.twitter.com/VrjKjZ4YGl
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 3, 2014
Btw, my favorite thing about this: notice the guy on the right hand side? Recognize him? No? That’s because he is the brother of Best Supporting Actress winner Nyong’o, who somehow was able to get himself front and center with all of these big-time celebrities.
I think its safe to assume that this was the best night of his life.
(Image source: https://twitter.com)
