Boston – Feb. 11, 2020 – Hollywood’s biggest night, the Academy Awards, wrapped up this year’s awards season in style.

While awards are permanent markers of achievement, visibility is a broader prize shared by winners, nominees, performers, and presenters. Research in partnership between Bain Media Lab and Hive analyzed which celebrities and themes were front and center during the 2020 Academy Awards.

Who stole the show (and the most screen time) during the 2020 Academy Awards?

Bong Joon Ho – who took the stage as a winner four times for Parasite – earned the most time on screen during Sunday’s telecast of the Academy Awards, according to data from Hive’s Celebrity Model. The remainder of the top 10 included winners (Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Laura Dern), presenters (Steve Martin, Chris Rock, Kristin Wiig, Maya Rudolph), and some celebs wearing multiple hats (Elton John as a winner and performer; Taika Waititi as a winner and presenter). The top 10 included:

1. Bong Joon Ho: 7 minutes, 4 seconds
2. Joaquin Phoenix: 4 minutes, 51 seconds
3. Elton John: 4 minutes, 12 seconds
4. Steve Martin: 3 minutes, 46 seconds
5. Chris Rock: 3 minutes, 44 seconds
6. Brad Pitt: 3 minutes, 40 seconds
7. Kristen Wiig: 3 minutes, 7 seconds
8. Maya Rudolph: 3 minutes, 2 seconds
9. Taika Waititi: 3 minutes, 2 seconds
10. Laura Dern: 2 minutes, 48 seconds

Diversity was the talk of the 2020 Academy Awards

Leading up to the event, talk about another host-less award show and one short on diversity created a stir. A diverse mix of presenters and performers aimed to compensate for nominees that skewed white and male. However, while these themes stole headlines leading up to the event and were scattered across acceptance speeches during the night, most of the show’s major themes were relatively consistent compared with past years.

Insights from what was said across award presentations and acceptance speeches, powered by Hive’s Speech-to-Text model, included:

• Thanks were given more than 120 times and love was expressed more than 55 times – mostly to thematic groups including The Academy, parents, partners, children, and God, as well as casts and crew
• Statements on diversity and inclusion – spanning gender, race, and sexual orientation – were sprinkled throughout the night and were material in aggregate

• • Women, plural, were referenced as a group more than 3 times as often as men, most notably differentiated by messages of strength and unity (“all women are superheroes”)
  • The presence of Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman in the 2019 Oscars drove more significant conversations about race during last year’s telecast, which was less in frequent this year although still referenced across multiple speeches (e.g., Matthew A. Cherry and Karin Rupert Toliver), award presentations (e.g., Chris Rock and Steve Martin), and performances (e.g., Janelle Monae)
• References to current events were scattered across the awards show, reflecting topics that impacted society over the past year including climate change and the environment, politics, and the death of Kobe Bryant
• For the second year in a row, Netflix earned the highest count of mentions by award recipients among media companies – even with just 2 of its 24 nominations resulting in wins

About Hive’s models:

• Hive’s Celebrity Model is trained to identify more than 80,000 public figures in media content and uniquely leverages Hive’s distributed workforce of more than 1.5 million registered contributors to efficiently optimize the precision and recall of low confidence results. Commercial uses of the model include measurement of endorsement value by agencies and enrichment of metadata in media companies’ video libraries.
• Hive’s Speech-to-Text Model parses and transcribes speech data from video and audio content, and can be accessed via an API or on device. The model is trained by tens of thousands of hours of paired audio and speech data. Commercial uses of the model include transcription of audio and monitoring of brand mentions in TV, radio, and digital video.

Editor's note: To arrange an interview with Dan Calpin, contact Dan Pinkney at dan.pinkney@bain.com or +1 646 562 8102.

Hive is an AI company specialized in computer vision and deep learning, focused on powering innovators across industries with practical AI solutions and data labeling. For more information, visit thehive.ai.

Note: Published Bain Media Lab research relies solely on third-party data sources and is independent of any data or input from clients of Bain & Company

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