My Oscar night was a little crazy. Normally, I spend the evening watching the event with my wife and kids. This time around, though, I was technically working—tweeting dutifully to whoever might be listening. I was spending time with four screens Sunday night: The television, a laptop and iPad for my tweets, and my smartphone to update my daughter on the winners and losers.
Every once in a while, I’d even talk to my wife.
I wasn’t unusual, really. The Oscars, like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, is really a communal cultural event. Twenty years ago, people would rehash the nights biggest moments over the water cooler or phone conversation. They’d have parties to share those moments in real time. Now, technology allows us to communally sigh over a particularly poignant speech or smirk at an odd wardrobe choice with our friends and followers in 140-character flurries. Nothing wrong with that.
But there was one moment during the Oscars that seemed like almost the ultimate statement on technology, entertainment and how the two have impacted the world. It was this:
We’ve likely all heard about Ellen DeGeneres’ selfie (actually taken by Bradley Cooper). It’s been retweeted 2.7 million times and counting. You probably would’ve gotten a retweet from me, too, had you been following … and had the selfie not temporarily “broken” Twitter for a few moments.
To me, the whole shot is fascinating for loads of reasons.
One, look at how good everyone looks. Jennifer Lawrence probably can’t take a bad picture. Kevin Spacey looks charmingly goofy. When Angelina Jolie (with the hand in front of her face) is a picture’s weak link, you know you’re clearly in the company of some seriously photogenic folks.
Two, everyone looks so real. If it wasn’t for their famous faces and their Oscar finery, you might think that this was a photo of just a bunch of ol’ friends going during a night on the town, or second cousins goofing off at a family reunion.
That’s what a host like DeGeneres brings to the Oscars. After hosting a talk show for so long, she has an innate ability to humanize celebrities—lasso the biggest stars in the industry and bring them a little closer to earth, as it were. Oh, we all know that Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt are just people … but they’re people whose bank accounts are far bigger than most of ours and whose daily concerns, we assume, are much different than our own. DeGeneres, through her Oscar schtick, did her best to break down walls between “us” and “them.” We saw celebrities chow down on pizza—just like some of us were doing from home. She got them to laugh at themselves. And for the selfie, she cajoled some A-list stars—who’ve collectively won 10 Oscars and been nominated for 40—to look like they’re just old friends clowning around for the camera.
See? They’re just like us.
Except that, if they were really just like us, the selfie wouldn’t have broken Twitter.
The selfie spoke to the very nature of celebrity, too. Slate writer Willa Paskin said the moment might’ve also been a subversive jab by DeGeneres—”a comment on how much we all love famous people and also a comment on how much famous people want to be loved. Ellen was celebrating fame, if you wanted to see that; she was also lightly poking fun, if you wanted to see that.”
And it spoke to our communal desire to be attached with that fame, too. Those 2.7 million retweets were by people who wanted to share in the moment. They wanted to be a part of the Oscars—to be included at the party. We wanted to feel like we were, in a very distant and digital way, rubbing elbows with Bradley and Julia and Lupita. We wanted to be there. And that selfie, oddly enough, allowed Twitter users to be there in a strange and very 21st-century way.
I wasn’t too surprised to learn there’s now a site that allows you to insert yourself into the famous selfie: We can be—in pixelated form—in the Dolby Theater, whether we’re wearing formal wear or a comfortable pair of sweats.
But our mere participation also, oddly enough, heightens the sense of distance between the Oscar stars and the average Joes and Janes. Because, of course, we realize that the only way we’ll ever be in the Dolby Theater on Oscar night is by digitally photobombing the shot. It all becomes a big metajoke with our own uncelebrity being the ultimate punchline.
DeGeneres’ selfie really did seem to shorten the distance between Oscar participants and Oscar watchers. And yet in another way, it stressed how great a distance there is.
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