Early this morning (very early if you live on the North American west coast) The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences announced the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards, better known to most of the world as The Oscars. Being that a lot of people around our offices are pop culture buffs, we were curious about the social buzz around each of the nominees, so we did what we do best; took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to analyze social conversations around the movies that were nominated for Best Picture.
The nominees for best picture this year include: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, 12 Years A Slave and Wolf Of Wall Street.
While all of these movies were surely great, we unfortunately weren’t able to include them all in the analysis you’re about to see. Due to the short time frame between the nominations being announced and our analysis, some of the movies had to be removed due the time they would have taken to create a working boolean query to narrow in just on movie talk. The movies Her, Gravity and Nebraska have been removed from the following analysis due to the amount of use those words get in regular conversations all year long. As an example, when we left Her (which we’re sure is a great movie) in our analysis, it accounted for 98% of all the conversations we found about all of the movie titles because it is such a common word. So, our apologies to all the people that put in hard work to make Her, Gravity and Nebraska for having to leave you out, but we wish you luck with your nominations all the same.
With the remaining six movies we performed an analysis to see which were being talked about the most and what the sentiment around each of them was.
First, we looked at the total number of mentions that each movie received. Here we found that of the six movies up for Best Picture that we analyzed, American Hustle came in first place with 587,613 mentions over 2013. That accounted for 23% of the total conversation from all six movies. Close behind it though was Wolf Of Wall Street with 556,176 total mentions (22% of the conversation) and 12 Years A Slave with 527,564 total mentions (21% of the conversation). The movie that we found got the most mentions in 2013 was Philomena which only received 148,968 mentions in 2013 (6% of the total conversation).
We then broke down the mentions of each movie by channel. What’s very interesting about looking at the movies like this is that the mentions on Twitter mirror the order that we found the movies ranked in in terms of total mentions. However, on blogs, in online news articles and on forums the order of ranking appears to be very different. 12 Years A Slave was actually mentioned the most on blogs, online news and forums. However, it was only the third most mentioned film on Twitter (which accounted for the bulk of mentions for all movies) which brought it down to third place in terms of overall mentions. As well, Philomena was ranked last in overall mentions, but was really only the least talked about movie on Twitter and in blog posts. Dallas Buyers Club was the movie which received the least amount of mentions in forum postings and in online news articles.
We then looked at total combined mentions for each of these movies as they came up over the course of 2013. It’s interesting to note that the majority of these films were released late in the year and that’s when the majority of talk about them happened as well. That’s not to say they weren’t being talked about earlier in the year. For example, looking at the popularity chart below we can see that Wolf Of Wall Street saw a huge spike in mentions around the middle of June. Wolf Of Wall Street was able to start their buzz earlier in the year as that’s when the first trailers for it started to appear in front of summer blockbusters, which got people talking in anticipation of the film’s release later in the year. The same can be seen (although with not as large mention spikes) for American Hustle and 12 Years A Slave.
Lastly, we looked at the sentiment around each of these films. Just because a film is being talked about a lot doesn’t mean that all of the talk is good. The best example of this is American Hustle. We saw earlier that American Hustle received the most mentions of all the films, however when we look at the sentiment around it we can also see that it had the most amount of negative sentiment around it. On the opposite side of that, both Philomena and Dallas Buyers Club were the two films we saw the least amount of conversation about, but both of them tied for having the greatest amount of positive conversation around them of all the films. It just goes to show that just because something is causing a lot of buzz doesn’t mean that it’s creating a lot of positive buzz.
Have you seen any of these movies? Which one do think is going to win the Best Picture category at The Oscars on March 2nd? And is your prediction based on the buzz we saw above or just your personal opinion? Let us know in the comments.
