How the Internet Reacted to the Oscars (As Told by GIPHY)
This year, the excitement around the Academy Awards wasn’t contained to the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. The same laughter, tears, surprises, and celebrations you saw on the Oscars telecast were in group texts and social posts all around the world — and GIPHY has the data to prove it. People used GIPHY’s official Oscar coverage (in partnership with the Academy) to react to everything from the red carpet to the final statue given.
We all know who won the big awards, but who won the night in the eyes of GIPHY users? Keep on reading to find out…
Top GIFs of the Night
As far as top-viewed GIFs of the night, there is one celeb who swept the top five, no questions asked. And, in our humble opinion, he earned it with his dynamic and inspiring performance in Anatomy of a Fall… Yes, it’s Messi the border collie, proving that you don’t have to be an Oscar winner, nominee, or even a human to win the hearts of Oscar audiences everywhere.
Following Messi is Oscar winner Cillian Murphy whose acceptance speech clearly struck a cord with our users in addition to *chef’s kiss* perfect reaction GIFs of Kate McKinnon and Jodie Foster.
Top Searches of the Night (by Volume)
Aside from searches for “Oscars” or “the Oscars” themselves, there are a few movies and actors that caught the attention of viewers in terms of overall search volume on GIPHY throughout the night. The top Oscars-related search terms of the evening include:
- Barbie
- Godzilla
- Oppenheimer
- John Cena
- Iron Man (credited to Robert Downey Jr.’s win)
This shows us that Barbie has not lost its momentum in connecting with GIPHY users, and perhaps can also be credited to Ryan Gosling’s show-stealing performance of “I’m Just Ken.” It also shows us the impact international films can have, such as Godzilla, in connecting with their audiences and that you don’t have to be a mega-blockbuster to resonate with users on GIPHY.
And do we really have to explain John Cena? TLDR — seems baring it all won him all the eyes on GIPHY (proud of you, John!). Not only was he the top-searched celeb of the night, but “John Cena” searches spiked nearly 500%.
Largest Spikes in Searches (Spoiler Alert: it’s Barbie Again)
Let’s call it “Barbenheimer 2.0” if we must… but we saw Barbie and Oppenheimer dueling it out in terms of the largest spikes in searches during the Oscars.
Let’s compare the two, shall we?
Barbie
- Despite coming away with only one win (Best Original Song), Barbie contributed four terms that peaked during the five-hour period observed: “Barbie”, “Ryan Gosling”, “Billie Eilish”, and “I’m Just Ken.”
- Ryan Gosling is Kenough. Search volume for his name rose 171% during the show, and his rendition of “I’m Just Ken” had GIPHY users banging on our doors for related content (volume rose ~7800% compared to the previous Sunday period).
- Ryan’s performance was a favorite of our editorial team’s as well, who encapsulated its reminiscence with Gentleman Prefer Blondes in this side-by-side post, here!
Oppenheimer
- The big winner of the night was also rewarded in search volume!
- Searches for “Oppenheimer” and “Nolan” both climbed by over 2,000% and searches for “Cillian Murphy” and “Robert Downey Jr.” climbed by more than 1,400%, respectively, during the span of the awards.
While not part of the Barbenheimer frenzy, a few other celebs saw major spikes in searches of their own, as well:
- Emma Stone won the hearts of the Academy and users alike, with the Best Actress seeing a spike of over 2,200% for searches for her name as well as a nearly 1,500% spike for searches for Poor Things.
- While Al Pacino had only a short presence during the show, searches for him spiked more than 700%.
In addition, we teamed up with Scribely to pilot the first ever realtime content with accessibility, with in-the-moment alt text for the visually impaired. Scribely’s writers worked with GIPHY to ensure hundreds of GIFs had meaningful and useful alt text descriptions as this content went live. We are so grateful to continue our partnership with Scribely through work like this pilot program to continue making GIPHY an accessibility forward platform and are excited to see where it could go from here.
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