Twitter was front-and-center at the Oscars on Sunday.
After noting how Donald Trump had yet to tweet about the Oscars, two-and-a-half hours into the big show, host Jimmy Kimmel took out an Android smartphone and actually tweeted at Trump while on stage during the Academy Awards:
https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/836060793783267328
The tweet immediately racked up thousands of retweets; it had more than 170,000 in just 17 minutes.
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/836061875066527744
Kimmel also appeared to tweet another message to Trump with the #MerylsaysHi hashtag, in reference to Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump speech during the Golden Globes, but it didn’t seem to go through.
https://twitter.com/BinaryGru/status/836061352292646912
Earlier in the show, Kimmel made several jokes and taunts about Trump. He also made the audience give a standing ovation to Streep.
Trump did not have an immediate response to Kimmel’s tweet. Trump uses Twitter heavily to make public statements.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/818419002548568064?lang=en
It was a nice bit of promotion for Twitter, with its mobile app getting displayed on the ABC broadcast to millions of people around the world. Twitter has been in the news more often given Trump’s utilization of the platform, though that hasn’t helped the company’s bottom line.
Twitter had another Oscars appearance on Sunday, as stars including Natalie Portman, Ryan Gosling, Samuel L. Jackson, Whoopie Goldberg, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Casey Affleck, Emma Stone, Jeff Bridges and Robert De Niro read from “Mean Tweets,” a popular segment on Kimmel’s show.
https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/836071991652163584
It was also another memorable Oscars-Twitter moment. Back in 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres took one of the most popular selfies of all time and posted it to Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/440322224407314432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw