At the Oscars this year, even the host was posting selfies on Twitter.
Twitter is the watercooler of the digital age, and nothing drives that home so clearly as a live event. This year’s Academy Awards saw the host, Ellen DeGeneres, get the likes of Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep to pose for a selfie. It quickly became the most retweeted tweet ever, overwhelming Twitter’s servers to such an extent that there was a brief blip in service.
Watching a telecast — especially of a live event — is no longer a passive event. Getting out a reaction and having it rebroadcasted as many times as possible has become integral to the event itself; the electronic equivalent of hosting a live-watch party. The Oscars are particularly suited to the snark Twitter thrives on. It is a pop culture truism that the ceremony is smugly self-congratulatory, runs overlong and is unfunny — witness the barely suppressed glee at the oft-wavering TRPs and the reams of e-ink devoted to explaining precisely what the Academy needs to do to woo those younger viewers.
Yet the show is also a cultural cornerstone, the culmination of awards season. So when new Best Actor winner Matthew McConaughey calls himself his hero a decade from now, or John Travolta mispronounces a performer’s name, or Will Smith, well, shows up, those moments become targets for experiments in internet humour. New memes are born, circulated and discarded in virtual cage-matches — the more irreverent, the better.
