Oscars Best Picture mishap sparked over 60,000 mentions across social in a single minute
Last night’s mishap at the Oscars, which initially awarded the Best Picture to La La Land before revealing Moonlight as the winner, sparked over 60,000 social mentions in one minute and caused sentiment around the event’s conversation to shift in a negative direction.
The moment where crew/cast of 'La La Land' realises a mistake had been made and 'Moonlight' actually won Best Picture
The mix up around the Best Picture announcement has emerged as defining moment for the 89th Academy Awards and across social the incident became the one extreme peak in a relatively even online discussion.
According to data from Brandwatch, mentions of both La La Land and Moonlight skyrocketed at the end of the program, culminating in almost 61,000 mentions across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
The impact of the error helped La La Land take the top spot in total mentions. The musical generated 8,200 mentions in the minute following the reveal which awarded it Best Picture. Mentions of Moonlight then erupted five minutes later with more than 12,600 mentions in one minute.
Sentiment of the Oscars’ conversation had until that point been largely positive with 71.9% of mentions categorised as positive. The incident sparked a shift in sentiment which subsequently moved in a more negative direction.
Many of these mentions used language like, “WTF,” “fail” and “wrong”. Before this, negative mentions were politically motivated.
The top hashtags during the event were as follows
At the time of writing the Academy Awards had yet to explain the mix up.