If Social Media Decided the Oscars. Our results are in!

The votes are in and D-Day is almost here! Ahead of the 90th Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow we’re ready to share our predictions for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film winners based on social media buzz.
We’ve analysed the social media presence of all the nominees as well as the volume of online chatter. We’ve looked at social media followers, but also overall potential reach (using the Gruvi Audience Calculator). We also analysed the number of mentions and sentiment in the month since the nominations have been announced, using Brandwatch’s platform.
If you need a more in depth recap on the nominees and the ground rules of how we determined the winners, have a look at our previous blog post:
Can Social Media Buzz predict the Oscars? We’re about to find out!
Best Foreign Language FilmWe should note that, across the board, the nominees in this category had a much more subdued presence on social media than the Best Picture Nominees. Several of them did not have any Instagram or Twitter accounts.
It came as a surprise to no one that The Square had the biggest online presence. The movie had accounts set up across all platforms, all of which were well populated with followers. We could not have foretold how well promoted The Insult was, however. It scored a 10 on both Facebook and Instagram followers, despite its following on Twitter not being equally strong.
Neither of the other three nominees had a Twitter account, and On Body and Soul and Loveless didn’t have a presence on Instagram either.
It was Andrey Zviaghintsev’s film that had the lowest overall presence, with under 1000 followers on Facebook- the only social media platform where it had a page. Despite that, its audience reach was the second highest (a score of 9.27)- after The Square. The director’s fame weighed heavy in this case.

A Fantastic Woman scores a perfect 10. Sebastian Lelio’s film was mentioned almost 6000 times and many of these mentions expressed a positive sentiment towards the movie. It also boasts the highest number of unique users starting conversations, almost double than the 2200 of Loveless (the runner up in terms of unique mentions).
Between its strong social media presence, it’s casting of Elisabeth Moss and Ruben Ostlund’s fame after his success with Force Majeure, it’s The Square who takes away the social media Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The movie has an overall score of 6.99, based on our grading system. The bottom position is held by Hungary’s submission, On Body and Soul (final score: 1.84).
Best PictureFor Best Picture, our results point in a slightly different direction than the latest bets, who have The Shape of Water as the frontrunner.
Looking just at the mentions and discussions on social media in the past month, Call Me by Your Name is the leader. It scored a 10 both on number of mentions (over 133 000) and on sentiment. It’s clear that Luca Guadagnino’s movie has touched many and is still riding a wave of popularity far greater than that of any other Best Picture nominee.
The runner up is Three Billboards, with a mentions score of 6.8 (90.8 K mentions on social media in the past 30 days, coming from some 69 000 users).
At the opposite end sits The Post. Steven Spielberg’s movie was only mentioned 37 000 times (a score of 2.77 on this category, equal to Phantom Thread). It also scores the lowest of the nine nominees on sentiment (0.10). Nevertheless, The Post had the second highest score on audience reach, based on our Audience Calculator- 9.57, with a reach of over 4.5 million potential fans.

Once we started to add in the numbers regarding social media presence (across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), the picture changed quite a lot. This is probably also partially due to the fact that the nominated pictures did not release at the same time. Dunkirk leads the pack here, with a score of 10 for the social media following on all channels. It also scored 10 on audience reach, due to the clout of Christopher Nolan and the cast members.
The Post came in second in terms of social media presence. The third position is a tie between Call Me By Your Name and Get Out.
Overall, counting both volume of chatter and social media presence, Dunkirk is the winner of this category, with a final score of 7.77. The runner up is Call Me By Your Name (score: 5.15). At the bottom of the top it looks like not even Daniel Day Lewis’ retirement was enough to rouse up social media enough for Phantom Thread, which only scored a total of 2.03 on our grading sheet.
And the winners are…… to be announced on Sunday! We’re looking forward to find out if we got it right this time around. It’s not very likely that Dunkirk will go home completely empty handed, given its 8 nominations. But even if it turns out that Christopher Nolan’s film doesn’t win Best Picture and The Square doesn’t triumph in the Best Foreign Language Film category, they can rest assured; they have won the hearts (and attention) of social media users!

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