The Twitter Effect on Oscar

On Twitter, Jesse James has never been one to mince words.

He tweets with all the bad-boy attitude and mucho macho swagger you'd expect from a celebrity chopper mechanic and star of such reality TV shows as Jesse James Is a Dead Man and Monster Garage.

But lately, James' tweets have served a different agenda: chronicling the vagaries of Hollywood's awards season.

The heavily tattooed and frequently scowling outlaw biker happens to be lead actress nominee Sandra Bullock's husband.

And when he hasn't been holding her purse on some event's red carpet, James has been tweeting about the experience.

"So proud & lucky today . . .

"Loving Life . . . ," James tweeted on January 18, a day after the missus won a Golden Globe and gave him a gushy shout-out from the stage.

"WoW! I'm wearing a suit for the 2nd time in One Week.

"I think it's a new record," James wrote a few hours before Bullock would claim her lead actress trophy at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on January 23.

A little later that day, James gave a tart appraisal of Tinseltown on his way to the ceremony: "How come the whole city of Hollywood smells like [urine]?"Hollywood has been fairly obsessed in recent months by the Twitter Effect: the social phenomenon that seemingly holds movies' box-office performance in its thrall.

Viewers send out snap judgements to their internet constituencies, rendering critical verdicts with far-reaching impact, often just minutes after leaving the theatre.

And such 140-character reviews have been proved to variously inflame or extinguish films' prospects in disproportionate measure to their haiku-size appearance on iPhones.

But at an awards season moment when this social networking platform du jour has become a crucial tool in "word of mouth" marketing and almost everyone with a strong opinion and access to broadband has a Twitter account, this information age predicament begs the question: has the Twitter Effect exerted any noticeable impact on this year's Oscars?

In an era when even 64-year-old Helen Mirren is known to tweet, people in the Oscar spotlight are using their ambient online presences to communicate with more immediacy, greater candour and without the filter of publicists than ever would have been imaginable before the information age enabled mass communication via people's smart phones.

That said, the nominees in marquee categories have yet to blatantly use Twitter to lobby Oscar voters or virally goose their chances of winning an Academy Award.

Almost everyone in the 2010 Oscars class has taken the time to set up a Twitter account, even if few of them reliably tweet.