The Academy Awards (also known as “The Oscars”) has developed a reputation as the biggest and most talked about movie award show of the year. Thus, it came as no surprise when the 88th annual show began trending on social media following the nominee announcement in January. This year however, it wasn’t the nominees that garnered the most attention; it was the lack of diverse nominees that took center stage. Celebrities and fans alike took to Twitter to express frustration over the continuous lack of minority representation in the individual categories.
#OscarsSoWhite black people can't even get nominated for the movies about black people… https://t.co/3ZM9y09R7b
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 14, 2016
The Initial Impact:
The Oscar nominees were announced January 14th at 8:30 a.m. ET and that day marked both the beginning and the peak of conversations surrounding #OscarsSoWhite. Nearly 111,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag within the first day—that number eventually growing to more than 444,700 within the first month. At the end of the January, Twitter mentions dwindled.
Diversity Across Borders:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the message of #OscarsSoWhite connected with audiences across the globe. While the majority of Twitter users utilizing the hashtag were in the United States (66.7%), there was also audience interest in places like Canada and Mexico which each held 6.1% of Twitter mentions. Following Mexico, Spain and France had 4.5% of mentions each, followed by the U.K. (3%), and Italy, Germany, Australia, and Malaysia with 1.5% each.
The Oscar Buzz:
It’s one thing to look at how many people were talking about #OscarsSoWhite and another to know what they were talking about. A word cloud graph of the hashtag indicates most people used the associative words, ‘academy’, ‘nominee’ or ‘nomination’ in tweets. However, there was also a large use of the words ‘boycott’ and ‘Jada’ likely referring to Jada Pinkett Smith’s announcement that she won’t attend the event because of the diversity issue. What’s particularly compelling about this graph is the diversity of languages represented with the associative words “indicado” and “actores”.
Contributors: Sara Gatcomb, Davis Hovey, and Jeff Goldberg
Really loved this thorough analysis of #OscarsSoWhite! I used this hashtag when the Oscar nominations initially came out, and it’s interesting to see what others said regarding the lack of diversity in the film industry. I’m curious to see what this hashtag looked like the night of the Oscars!