Guest Blog: People 'Loved' the Globes, Despite #Awkward Gervais Trend

Out of nearly 1.8 million tweets about Sunday night’s Golden Globes, 680,976 included a specific emotional reaction, and of those emotional reactions, 45% expressed “love” (or similar words expressing love), according to a Canvs.tv analysis. Other top reactions: “congratulations” (17.2%) and “dislike” (11.3%).

The most loved moment of the Golden Globes came when Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama for his role in The Revenant, prompting 11,038 tweets expressing love. Other notable spikes came when Sylvester Stallone won his first Golden Globe for his role in Creed and when Jennifer Lawrence won for Joy.

Repeat host Ricky Gervais again played up his acerbic brand of comedy, and the Twittersphere took the bait with 19% of tweets that contained his name (or Twitter handle) expressing “funny” or equivalent words, and 31.5% tweeting some form of “dislike.” Nearly 26% expressed love towards him or something he said, while 7.9% used the word “crazy” or similar words.

While his monologue generated the highest activity, his introduction of Mel Gibson, and Gibson’s response (“I love seeing Ricky once every three years because it reminds me to get a colonoscopy”), drove sizeable spikes in comments about the host.

Among the evening’s top hashtags associated with Gervais: #colonoscopy, #melgibson and #awkward.