Celebs get all-a-twitter for Oscars

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]?" Twitter accounts.

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.

Getting votes

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.

Some, like supporting actress nominees Maggie Gyllenhaal and Penélope Cruz, may be inveterate twitterers, for all the public knows. But they have "protected feeds" that are off-limits to everyone except pre-screened followers — academy voters included.

Others, including adapted screenplay nominee Neill Blomkamp supporting actress nominee Mo'Nique, lead actor nominee George Clooney and even co-host Steve Martin have gone to the trouble to create Twitter profiles for themselves. But none of them has composed a single tweet.

Meanwhile, Gabourey Sidibe, up for a lead actress Oscar for her turn in Precious, has used her Twitter presence to create consciousness about her debut movie role.

"I play a teen who is enrolling in an alternative high school," Sidibe tweeted on November 2.

"My character is repeatedly raped and has been impregnated twice by her father."

But according to one publicist, who declined to be identified for fear of running a-foul of his tweet-happy clients, celebs run the risk of alienating fans by putting too much online.

On the TweetDeck, he points out, discretion is the better part of valour.

"You have to remind them: ‘There are maybe 500,000 people reading your every word. You cannot assume everyone will understand your sense of humour.' Irony isn't always obvious. It's when they forget Twitter is a marketing device and they're not just talking to friends that there are problems."

Jason Reitman, nominated for director and adapted screenplay for Up in the Air, has done plenty to lay bare the vagaries of the long awards season.

A habitual Twitterer he has chronicled its sublime ("I'm so proud to be amongst these storytellers...Thank you for this great honour,") as well as the ridiculous ("I need to stop playing XBOX and iron my tuxedo shirt"). "I hope all of you get to feel what it's like to open one of these one day..." Reitman posted on February 8.

Not every celebrity gets the Twitter Effect. "What is follow Friday? Should I be following more people?" lead actress nominee Mirren tweeted in April. "I don't think i've really grasped Twitter etiquette yet. Sorry all."