Entertainment

Can Social Media Predict the Best Picture Winner?

by Anneliese Cooper

The results of the Academy Awards Best Picture race will be announced officially in just a few hours — but the Internet has already chosen its champion. Social media analytics company RelishMix tracked around 40 million posts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., from the January 16th nominations to the February 25th voting close, and tallied up the number of mentions of the nine Best Picture nominees. The result: a landslide for Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street , with 12,333,409 hits. American Hustle makes for a relatively close second with 8,019,682, while the seemingly equally-acclaimed Her limps in at only 701,205.

However, before we go dancing in the streets on Leonardo DiCaprio's behalf, it's worth questioning these results just a little. For example, it's unclear whether these posts were all necessarily positive — whether some mentioned the film only to say something like "The Wolf of Wall Street? What a bloated, pointless waste of celluloid!" or "Bro, check out Leo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street synced to this Meshuggah song!" Also, it's worth wondering whether these numbers took into account the films' online marketing campaigns; I'd be willing to bet at least a handful of those 12 million plus posts were sponsored. And even if the software was precise enough to gather only laudatory data points from real, unbiased people, it remains unlikely that social media will accurately predict the Academy's decision. As Deadline points out, sites like Twitter tend to skew a bit more youthful than the age of the average Academy member; I'm not counting on Errol Morris to hop on Vine and voice his love for 12 Years a Slave (though, God, I wish he would).

Still, if Marty and Leo end up snubbed tonight, at least they can feel heartened that they have the Internet peoples' choice award — or, that their publicists have excellent Twitter interns. Plus, charging into tonight's proceedings, they've already got their battle cry all set: