Rash Report: For Oscars, social networks win, even if 'Social Network' doesn't

By John Rash
Star Tribune editorial writer

After its Golden Globe victory, "The Social Network" was the odds-on favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

But based on the recent run of victories at other awards shows, "The King's Speech" now seems poised to steal the crown.

Maybe they should split it.

After all, "The King's Speech" may have worked best on the big screen, but social networks (the media, not the movie) are working best for the small screen.

Live blogging, tweeting and posting have increased interest in awards shows like the Oscars, allowing them to defy network television ratings trends by increasing viewing.

This wasn't always the case for the Academy Awards.

The show used to be more dependent on Best Picture winners' big box office.

In 1998, "Titanic's" gold rush -- $600 million box office and 11 gold statues -- also had the Midas touch on TV, as swooning teens tuned it to make it the most watched Oscars ever, with more than 55 million viewers.

But the next year's winner hit a box-office and ratings iceberg. "Shakespeare in Love" (which must have sounded like homework to the "Titanic" teens) had only 17 percent as big a box office, and 82 percent as many viewers.

This wasn't a one-time film phenomenon.

The guy equivalent to "Titanic" -- the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- spiked viewing, particularly in 2004, when the third film, "The Return of the King," made $377 million and drew 43.5 million viewers.

Two years later, a non-Hobbit view of a world in conflict, "Crash," earned just $54 million and 38.9 million viewers.

Last year, the trends inverted. Best Picture "The Hurt Locker," about a bomb-detonation team in Iraq, was a box-office dud, earning only $17 million.

Comparatively, 2009's winner, "Slumdog Millionaire," had a relatively rich payout of $141 million. But remarkably, Oscars ratings were still up 15 percent from the prior year.

The difference may be more about tweets filed than seats filled.

The Academy Awards was by far the top-trending Twitter topic during Oscars week last year.

And while some of the top-trending subtopics are predictable (Best Actress Sandra Bullock), others show how social networks can be pop culture canaries in a coal mine: Kathryn Bigelow ("Hurt Locker") not only beat her ex-husband, James Cameron ("Avatar") for Best Director, she outtrended him on Twitter.

And it's not just the Academy Awards.

The Grammy Awards, despite its big awards going to obscure artists like Esperanza Spalding and Arcade Fire, had 26 million viewers, making it the most-watched show in a decade.

Just like the Oscars, the Grammys were the top topic on Twitter, with two nominees, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, at Nos. 4 and 5.

Similar dynamics drove recent awards shows: The Emmy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, American Music Awards and the People's Choice Awards were top five trenders for the week they were telecast.

And within the week they ran, even made-for-cable kudos like the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, the Country Music Television Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, the VH1 Hip Hop Awards, the BET Awards and ESPN's homage to honored athletes -- the ESPYs and its hot dog eating contest -- spiked to the top spot, at least for a night.

Even the National Spelling Bee inspired tweets.

Like the Web itself, this trend knows no national borders. International interest in the British Soap Awards, the Eurovision Song Contest, MTV European Music Awards, the Miss Venezuela pageant and the Seoul Music Awards (the capitol, not the genre) also rocketed to the top.

"It's remarkable to me how many people are tweeting while they are watching television," said Liz Pullen, a trend analyst from New York-based social media tracking firm What the Trend.

"TV is much bigger on Twitter than movies because people are talking as something's unfolding in front of them -- especially awards shows, which are just one big celebrity reality show," she said. "It just seems to be bringing people into the water-cooler community -- it ties people together very loosely with a larger national discussion."

What Pullen's firm can't track, but is apparent in this "larger national discussion," is its nasty tone.

Caustic commenters try to outdo each other in dissing designer gowns or rejecting acceptance speeches from long-winded winners. Maybe the solitary safety of family rooms is debasing the discourse, as 44 percent of us now watch prime-time alone.

"We're holding on to our civility with such a thread in our contemporary American society," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a notable new book, "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other."

"Everything that undermines our civility we have to examine very closely."

Turkle worries we're losing something by connecting via Facebook rather than face-to-face.

"The danger is that we've set up a vicious circle that is not feeding back into sociality, but is defining sociality in terms of what the social network can do. The habit I would like to see us take up as a culture is that every step of the way we say, 'What are our options here in using social networks to bring us together?'"

A model already exists that doesn't require disconnecting from the great benefits of social networks in order to connect with each other. But it involves green turf, not red carpets.

The Super Bowl trends well on Twitter, but despite a record audience of 111 million viewers, the Packers-Steelers topped out at only No. 3, even below Britney Spears.

That's probably because even though there's a supercomputer's worth of Super Bowl commentary on social media leading up to the game, at kickoff people were too busy talking -- in person -- to tweet.

At least for one night, at least one awards show was driven more by human networks than those involving computers.

John Rash is a Star Tribune editorial board member. His Rash Report column appears on Saturday. You can John at 8:20 a.m. weekdays on WCCO Radio, 830-AM. Follow him on Twitter @rashreport.