Oscars 2015: Lady Gaga provides show’s biggest Twitter, Facebook moment

And the Oscar goes to ... social media! (Kind of.)

The 87th Academy Awards generated about 5.9 million tweets, a significant drop from the whopping 11.1 million Oscar-related tweets from last year’s show. However, more social-media buzz also came from Facebook, where 21 million people across the globe had 58 million interactions related to the annual awards show.

In recent years, the motion picture academy has increased efforts to encourage audiences to engage more with the ceremony on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

FULL COVERAGE: Oscars 2015

So far, it’s been working. Twitter reported that last year’s Oscars show was the most tweeted non-sporting live event. Host Ellen DeGeneres even made social-media history with her selfie with Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie and other stars.

This year, an estimated 2 million Oscar-related tweets included “reactions” (tweets that contain any kind of emotion), according to Canvs, a social TV platform created by social media insight firm Mashwork.

The company uses relevant tweets, provided by Nielsen, from three hours before, during and three hours after an episode’s initial broadcast, local time, to gauge what emotions people have about TV. The tweets are then broken down into “reactions.”

So how did host Neil Patrick Harris do? According to Canvs, Harris was mentioned in 95,072 “reactions,” or 5% of all total Oscar “reactions” tweets, over the course of the night. An estimated 60% of those reactions contained love and 10% contained hate, the Canvs data show.

The three films that were the most mentioned on Twitter were “Birdman” (which won four awards), “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (which also received four awards) and “Boyhood” (which got one award).

The most-tweeted-about nominees and performers included Lady Gaga, Patricia Arquette (who won best supporting actress for her role in “Boyhood”) and John Legend (who performed “Glory” with Common).

Lady Gaga’s “Sound of Music” medley tribute, followed by Julie Andrews’ onstage appearance, was by far the biggest moment in the show in terms of Twitter and Facebook reactions.

On Twitter, the performance drove the largest spikes in conversation, measured in tweets per minute. Similarly, Facebook said Lady Gaga’s onstage moment topped the Oscar-related buzz on its platform with 214,000 people per minute posting about it across the globe.

Other moments that stood out to social-media users included when Arquette gave her acceptance speech and when Alejandro Iñárritu spoke after “Birdman” won best picture.

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Interestingly, “Birdman” had both the most hate reaction tweets (5,582) and congratulations reaction tweets (7,119) “reactions” after winning best picture, according to Canvs data.

Twitter users expressed the craziest moment of the night was when Idina Menzel and John Travolta reunited a year after he butchered her name at last year’s Oscars. About 1,141 “reactions” contained jokes mentioning “Adele Dazeem.”

Social-media users were also buzzing about red-carpet moments, including an interview with “Fifty Shades of Grey” star Dakota Johnson and her mother Melanie Griffith.

The interview garnered an estimated 3,283 reaction tweets, 54% of which expressed embarrassment for the duo using words such as “awkward,” “uncomfortable” and “cringe.”

But for the show’s organizers, any Oscars-related social-media buzz -- for better or worse -- is a good thing.

“We’re thrilled there are so many people that want to talk about the show, however they want to talk about it,” Josh Spector, the academy’s managing director of digital media and marketing, told The Times earlier this month. “It’s not our job to police that.”

Staff writer Josh Rottenberg contributed to this report.

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