Social Media Analysis: The Oscars Edition

  • Author

    Klara Malnar

  • Published

    Feb, 10, 2020

  • Reading time

    4 min

The 92nd Academy Awards ceremony was held last night, or widely known as The Oscars 2020. Compared to last year, there were no big controversies leading up to this year’s ceremony. 

The only thing that stood out, yet again, was the lack of women representation among the nominees. People were disappointed that Greta Gerwig wasn’t nominated for the best director. If she was nominated, Gerwig would be the first woman to be nominated in that category twice. 2019 was a year with the record number of movies made by women, so beside Gerwig, the Oscars snub also applies to Lorene Scafaria, Lulu Wang and many more. 

The Oscars 2020 so male

This prompted the #OscarsSoMale on Twitter. The hashtag was used all around the world, but mostly in the US and Germany.

While many expressed their grievances with The Academy online, the ones that were attending mentioned this topic quite a few times during the ceremony. Natalie Portman, for example,  expressed her disappointment by embroidering the names of snubbed female directors on her dress.

On a lighter note, the ceremony itself was quite enjoyable. Like last year, it was hostless, and it worked pretty well. Janelle Monae and Billy Porter opened the ceremony with the spectacular performance, while Steve Martin and Chris Rock delivered an opening monologue.

The reactions

Over the course of the evening, there were over 4 million mentions of The Oscars on Twitter alone. Most commented topics were the history-making movie Parasite, unexpected performance from Eminem, Joaquin Phoenix’s speech, and the movie Joker.

Speaking of Eminem, that was actually the most random part of the ceremony. No one expected it, there was no particular reason for the performance, and the audience had question marks popping around their heads. The performance was great, and it got standing ovations, but it felt as if there was some extra time to fill, and this is what they’ve come up with at the last minute.

Overall, the online mentions of Oscars were 90% positive, most of them including mentions of Oscar 2020 winners, their speeches, and fashion choices. 

sentiment analysis of 2020 oscars

The movies

When it comes to nominated movies, the one with the biggest number of mentions was Joker, followed by Parasite and 1917. The online mentions, in this case, reflected the competitiveness of this year’s nominees. 

oscars 2020 nominees

There was no clear winner in this category, compared to some other ones and it really was a mystery until the very end. Even though the Parasite was the favorite of many, everyone assumed the Oscar for the Best Picture would probably go to Joker, 1917 or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

When Jane Fonda read out loud the winner, the room went crazy. Parasite made history by being the first foreign-language film to win the Best Picture category. Not only that, Parasite won four Oscars in total, which is the highest number of any movie this year. It was followed by 1917 with three Oscars

If you look at the sentiment chart closely, it kinda predicted the winner. The Parasite had the most positive mentions out of all movies, and the smallest number of negative mentions out of the top three movies. 

Since there were a lot of controversies surrounding the Joker, it’s not surprising to see the highest number of negative mentions. Of all movies, The Marriage Story has the lowest number of negative mentions.   

Read What’s the Hype: The Oscars edition 

sentiment analysis for oscars 2020 nominees

The Thespians

It was a big night for Laura Dern and Brad Pitt, as well. They both won their first Oscars (first acting Oscar for Pitt) for supporting roles in The Marriage Story (Dern) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Pitt)

Both of them had great acceptance speeches. Pitt commented on the current political situation in the US by saying: 

“They told me I only had 45 seconds this year, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.”

Dern, on the other hand, praised her parents by saying: 

“Some say never meet your heroes, I say if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents.”

The Oscar for the Best Actor and Actress went to Renee Zellweger and Joaquin Phoenix. They also made passionate speeches.

 Phoenix called for fighting against injustice and giving people second chances. At the end of his speech, he read the line his late brother wrote:

“Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.'” 

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1226747685006434304

On the other hand, Zellweger prolonged her speech quite a bit, and Twitter wasn’t having it. 

https://twitter.com/RachaelEHarris/status/1226728735744782337

The fun parts

Have you seen Tom Hanks doing push-ups on a red carpet with a U.S. Army Seargent? It’s a first!

Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig tried to impress the directors with their acting range, but it seems that there was one person in the audience they didn’t impress.

When the Academy cut the Parasite acceptance speech by turning off the lights, the audience was rooting for more time.

James Corden and Rebel Wilson made fun of their movie Cats which flopped massively at the box office.

The End

When I was doing the analysis of the last year’s ceremony, I wrote:

“It seems that the Oscars 2020 are finally getting on the right track. Let’s hope they’ll continue the good work next year!”

And I think they’ve done just that. When it comes to the entertainment that is. When it comes to representation, despite Parasite’s victorious night, there’s a lot of work to do still. Compared to the last year, Oscars 2020 were smooth sailing.

The social media analysis showed that even though we can’t 100% correctly predict whose going to win the awards by analyzing social media reactions solely by number, we might be on to something by focusing on the substance of the mentions. Parasite and Joker are great examples of that.

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