I’m going to be honest and tell you all that I’m not really a big fan of award shows. At most I watch music award shows, but mainly only to see the performances. However, it’s been brought to my attention that this Sunday is the 83rd annual Academy Awards, or as they’re more more commonly known, The Oscars.
This Sunday all the big Hollywood stars come out to see what was the best movie of the year, who the best actress and actor were and a whole slew of other awards. While some people are claiming that social media can predict a winner, I think that movie buzz is a bit different. Popularity with movies doesn’t always translate over into all the technical aspects that are looked at when the best film is awarded. That said, I still thought it would be fun to take a look at the buzz surounding some of this years top films. Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I was able to take a look at what the social web had to say.
The first thing I did was pull up a popularity chart looking at chatter about The Oscars. No surprise that most of the past six months had little talk of The Oscars. We can however see a large spike near the end of January. When I zoomed in on the conversation it turns out that that spike represnted the day that Oscar nominations were announced.
A look at our buzzgraph, which shows us the words most used in conjunction with our search term, we can see the words “nominated” and “nomination” right in the middle of the conversation. From there we can see people were talking about nominated movies, categories for nomination, actors and actresses. A few other interesting common words we can see are “hope” most likely from people hoping one of their favourites wins and “snubbed” for people talking about a favourite of theirs that must have not been nominated.
Among all those nominations we found out which films were up for best picture of the year. These films were: Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter’s Bone. I decided to take a look at what the talk of these movies looked like throughout the year (NOTE: to make the charts readable I had to remove two films from the list. I removed Toy Story 3 because while it was good, a majority of people I asked said it wouldn’t win. I also removed Winter’s Bone because I had never heard of it, but with my luck it will most likely be chosen as the winner).. While each film has it’s peak, I wasn’t surprised to see Inception leading the pack in conversation.
And just to show how much more conversation was going on about Inception I’ve also created a pie chart of the same information shown as share of voice. Looking at the information like this we can see that Inception dominated the conversation with 48%. That’s almost half of all the talk about all eight movies.
Lastly, I had to look at sentiment around these films. Here we see the sentiment around each film since the nomination announcements. By giving it a time frame of the last month I thought that results may be more fair since some movies had been out for months longer than others. It seems like a pretty close race with in positive sentiment with The Social Network having 54% positive, closely followed by Inception at 53% and The King’s Speech at 51%. 127 Hours, True Grit and Black Swan aren’t far behind either.
That’s what people were saying about The Oscars and the films up for best picture through social media. Again I’ll say that I don’t think popularity online will predict the winner like it sometimes does for other awards and sporting events, but it is still interesting to see. Only time will tell which of these films will take home the award.
Which film do you think will win?
