The Oscar night is extremely important not only for the whole film industry and cinema fans but also for brands that are doing their best to benefit from the Oscar buzz. Last year’s Samsung campaign based on a selfie taken by Ellen DeGeneres that was seen in almost all of the media in the world is a perfect example.

Ellen DeGeneres selfie at the last year’s Oscars

But still it’s all about the movies and best actors. We analyzed the popularity of Oscar-nominated films and actors among fans using social media. Fans play very important role in social campaigns of films which tend to be very short and intensive. By sharing the news about the films they’re watching, fans contribute to the popularity of films themselves.

And the social media Oscar for the Best Picture goes to…

This year 8 films are nominated to the Award in the most important category.  All of them have Facebook profiles. The most popular is American Sniper with over 1.5 m fans and it’s the only nominee to pass 1 million fans milestone. The second biggest profile is The Grand Budapest Hotel with over 477k fans. The critics favourite – Birdman ranks 7th with 100k fans. From 5 films nominated in Best Foreign Language Film category only two have Facebook profiles, Polish Ida and Argentinian Wild Tales. If social media were to decide, the winner would definitely be Wild Tales with over 120k fans.

On the contrary, Fifty Shades of Grey movie has over 8, 98 m fans on Facebook, 473 k followers on Twitter and its trailer has been watched over 58, 7 m times which is over 10 times more than the most watched American Sniper trailer and over a half of the total number of views of all films nominated in the Best Picture category this year. The movie directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson is not very likely to win the real Academy Award, but undoubtedly we can say that in social media it has already won everything that there was to win. 🙂 When we conducted a similar study in 2013, also a non-winning movie, Ted,  was the most popular in social media.

Check the social media Oscars winners

The majority of actors nominated in the Best Actor/Actress category is absent from social media. Only Reese Witherspoon and Bradley Cooper have Facebook fanpages. Not many more nominees have Twitter profiles – besides from Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton. If Twitter users were to decide, the Oscar would go to Steve Carell for his performance in Foxcatcher as his profile has 3.86 m followers.

How did the filmmakers, studios and actors react in social media to the nominations? Surprisingly calmly. No super funny posts, few exclamation marks, just ordinary congratulations. Even though the posts with congratulations were extremely popular in social media. On Faceboook most likes and shares gained, that’s no surprise, American Sniper. Their congratulations posts has now (on Feb, 17th) over 65k likes and 12k shares. When Steve Carell tweeted that he’s nominated, his post gained 7k favs and almost 2k retweets, Reese Witherspoon tweeted a photo with her Wild co-star Laura Dern and gained 1.2 favs and 447 retweets.

There is however one good example of witty using of social media to announce winning a prize in the film industry, athough it’s not connected with the Oscars. On the same night – February 8th –  two ceremonies were held – Grammy and BAFTA Awards. Exactly like two years ago, when he complained about Taylor Swift being given the Grammy award, Kanye West tried again to hijack the Grammy ceremony. At the same time “Boyhood” won the BAFTA award. Look how “Boyhood” elegantly connected both events.

Check the 2015 social media Oscars winners!

Oscar nominated films and actors in social media – Infographic

Gathering data we followed several rules concerning counting views on YouTube. In Best Picture category we counted only official (designated as such by YouTube either by the distributor) trailers published on official channels. The data is accurate on the February 17th. In Best Foreign Film category we counted only trailers for international/US audience, excluding numerous different language and regions versions, mainly because their views number is small and insignificant for the final result. We decided not to include neither Wikipedia-based Facebook profiles nor  private profiles – only fanpages.