Oscar Selfie Taken

Date: March 2, 2014 • Location: Washington, United States

The Oscar selfie, considered to be one of the most influential photographs of all time, was taken at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony. The Oscar selfie is the popular name of a selfie taken by actor Bradley Cooper at the 86th Academy Awards in 2014, featuring a variety of celebrities. The host of the ceremony, Ellen DeGeneres, urged viewers of the ceremony to make a tweet with the picture the most re-tweeted tweet in history, which was accomplished before the broadcast was over at over 2 million retweets. The virality of the tweet caused Twitter to temporarily crash and be offline. The photo was taken with a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and was estimated to have been worth up to $1 billion in advertising for Samsung, which donated $1 to charity for each retweet, to a maximum of $3 million. The picture also sparked controversy over copyright laws in the United States in regards to user-generated content on social media after DeGeneres granted the license to the Associated Press, despite Cooper having taken the photo. It also inspired the "sealfie", a trend by Canadian Inuit protesting DeGeneres's donations to groups opposed to seal hunting.