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March 8, 2010
The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the
hot searches
list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here's a snapshot:
Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search?
Zoe Saldana
's purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up
Miley Cyrus
, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham's finest. Both beat searches for
Sandra Bullock
's dress (Marchesa) by large margins.
Sarah Jessica Parker
, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them.
Elie Saab
(worn by Anna Kendrick),
Armani Prive
(Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and
Marchesa
(Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.
Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced.
Avatar
had the most searches before the ceremony, but as
The Hurt Locker
received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture.
Precious
also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of "Avatar" during the ceremony:
The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here's a look at a few of the star searches last night:
Finally, the evening wasn't all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher.
Music by Prudence
,
Logorama
,
Food, Inc.
,
The Cove
and
The Secrets in their Eyes
all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.
Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow's height and Miley Cyrus's mother's tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney's (Elisabetta Canalis).
So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When
George Clooney
wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof.
Ben Stiller
’s appearance as a Na'vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof.
Molly Ringwald
and
Matthew Broderick
’s
John Hughes
tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia;
Sixteen Candles
,
The Breakfast Club
,
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
and
Home Alone
all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including
Ron Silver
,
Natasha Richardson
,
Patrick Swayze
and
Brittany Murphy
. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a
Meryl Streep kiss
in her acceptance speech.
As we've seen in presidential
debates
, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [
catharsis
] (from Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation with Tina Fey) and [
spooning
] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).
We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent... oh, they're telling me to wrap it up...!
Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst
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