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 Jan. 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 Jan. 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 judgments to their Internet constituencies, rendering critical verdicts with far-reaching impact, oftentimes just minutes after leaving the theater. 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?