Twitter loses it as Leonardo DiCaprio finally clinches Oscar glory

29 Feb 2016

It’s been a long time coming, many might say, but Leonardo DiCaprio has finally won his Oscar, and Twitter appeared to be the hub of all celebration’s following last night’s awards ceremony.

For at least a decade, the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio has been the lead actor in a string of box-office hits yet has never won the Best Actor award at the Oscars has been a gag with plenty of mileage.

At the awards ceremony last night (28 February), DiCaprio’s competition was considered strong enough to shake the film critics’ confidence that he would finally get his chance, with equally impressive performances by Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl and Ireland’s Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs.

But once it came down to it and the award winner’s name was called out, DiCaprio was received rapturous ovation from the crowd, and all he had to do to get it was crawl through miles of dirt and eat raw animal carcasses in The Revenant.

His acceptance speech was particularly noteworthy for his closing comments on the reality of climate change and its visible effects seen throughout 2015 and so far in 2016 citing it as the “the most urgent threat facing our entire species”.

But it’s hard to imagine that at that time people on Twitter heard it as they rushed to overreact to the news of his award, with some clearly having prepared for the announcement.

In fact, Twitter users pretty much lost it at the news, with a new record rate of 440,000 tweets per minute being achieved following his award, beating the previous record-holder, that being the Ellen DeGeneres selfie tweet from the 2014 Oscars.

Others were probably just a little sad that one of the internet’s most popular memes of recent times has finally become incorrect.

And then there’s the Vines, of course.

But, of course, the final word has to go to the award winner himself.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com