How We Tweet About the Oscars

Twitter is now analyzing just how much the Oscars dominate the social conversation — and just how much Zero Dark Thirty pissed people off — with their official new Twitter Oscars Index, a site that seeks to monitor Twitter chatter about the nominated movies, actors and directors. The webpage for the Index explains that it "measures how Twitter Users are referring to Academy Award Nominees relative to the overall conversation on Twitter on any given day." The movies are then given Index numbers which evaluate how positive the conversation has been: "For example, if a nominee has an Index of 80, comments about that nominee are more positive than roughly 80% of all the other terms on Twitter." While you can click over and explore more, note that Zero Dark Thirty—which is measured by the light green line—has a significantly lower index than most of its competitors in the Best Picture category. That film is arguably the most hotly debated film of the year, as its depictions of torture have been called into question. 

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There are other interesting findings in the data. Clicking over to the Best Actor race note that Joaquin Phoenix, who stars in The Master and has been iffy on the subject of the Oscars, often has dipped below his counterparts. He is marked by the red line: 

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