“Nice!” he shouted to applause and cheers.
“We did it!” Ellen shouted, getting pecked on the cheek by Meryl.
“Oh, I’ve never tweeted before!” the sixty-four-year-old exclaimed.
Ellen wanted one more. She glided across the aisle to Chiwetel Ejiofor,
a Best Actor nominee for 12 Years a Slave, and snapped a second selfie
with him in his seat, turning around in time to catch the two photo bombers
behind them, Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch.
“God, you’re a photo hog,” she barked at Pitt.
Then Ellen made her move and set the image to a tweet blasted out on
her personal account.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo
ever. #oscars.This for an image that was blurry, poorly lit, and slightly off-kilter,
devoid of the perfectionism of the fading epoch of print media.
Which made this moment all the more significant. Eleven of the
greatest legends of Hollywood—among them the winners of ten Oscars
who together had $9 billion in earnings—had spontaneously gathered
together into a single shot on the theater floor, an act that would otherwise
have required the butting egos of throngs of talent agents and high-powered
lawyers and quite possibly months of planning.
But all were happy, all were natural. And the moment was historic.
Within minutes the photo had thousands of retweets. Then tens of
thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Soon, millions.
Keyboard paparazzi chattered about Kevin Spacey’s goofy gaping
mouth, about Ellen’s warm smile, and about whether the moment was
planned, or maybe not, or maybe it secretly was. Then the Twitterians
noticed the peculiar logo on Ellen’s phone. Afterward audiences noticed
that when she went backstage she was tweeting from her usual iPhone.
But this was a Samsung.
Todd Pendleton was watching from the audience when he turned to a
colleague and remarked, “This is going to be one of the biggest product-
placement moments ever.” Since his arrival at Samsung, it had been three
years in the making. It was spontaneous, inventive, and improvisational.
And it had just the sliver of planning needed to make a splash.