He just couldn't get an Oscar. It didn't matter, we, the Internet, still loved him and embraced his situation.

1. Reach
January 1 to December 1
Falling in Love
How the Internet fell in love with Leonardo Dicaprio
By Katie Meyer

2. In the world of film, he’s famed director Martin
Scorsese’s favourite leading man and has won
awards for his environmentalism and acting.
DiCaprio has picked up three Golden Globes, two
Critics’ Choice Awards, and one Scream Award.
He even holds two Blockbuster Entertainment
Awards: a testament to his long tenure in show
business.
Until this year, DiCaprio seemed to have
everything but an Oscar.
Context – DiGiorno on Twitter

3. What did winning an Academy Award do to
Leonardo DiCaprio online, and why did the Internet care so much?
Context – DiGiorno on Twitter

4. Becoming Meme
In the 90s, before Tumblr and Reddit churned out
memes like studios churn out remakes, DiCaprio’s
image in the public eye was enviable… but not
pristine. As a member of the dubiously named Pussy
Posse (see right), he had a reputation that is entirely
explained by that name.
But that was before most Millenials started making
memes on the Internet. That was before Strutting
Leo turned a megastar and global brand into an
affable, goofy snapshot that has stayed popular for
more than five years. Other snapshots of DiCaprio
followed suit, becoming their own memes in the
same Goofy Leo genre.

5. Becoming Meme
As found in Crowdbabble, his earliest forays online
(in the form of tweets) had low engagement: about
0%.Strutting Leo was the perfect remix of a very
polished brand into a funny, Internet-made meme.
In 2008, grassroots enthusiasm for Strutting Leo
skyrocketed with Buzzfeed and Funny or Die recaps,
and thousands of notes on Tumblr. StruttingLeo.com
was purchased and populated.
At the height of the recession, making fun of a
millionaire somehow made him even more
likeable and less aloof. Goofy Leo quickly
blossomed into an entirely new genre of meme that
would become even more powerful: Likeable Leo
Pines for Oscar.

6. Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star
The characters DiCaprio played in the early 2010s
were often victims of injustice. Young social media
users found parallels DiCaprio and his characters,
who are usually unfairly deprived some key
ingredient (a family, escape, some sitting room on a
giant piece of wood floating in a freezing ocean).
The sympathy for his characters spilled over. Poor
Leo became another sympathetic character waiting
for much-needed validation. The first network to
popularize Poor Leo, 9gag users started posting
memes about the actor’s pitiable quest for a golden
statue. Poor Leo also became a popular hashtag on
Tumblr with thousands of posts.

7. Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star
Reddit was soon to follow.
Posts with DiCaprio in the
headline have racked up more
than 100,000 upvotes (I
stopped counting after the
first of many pages of
submitted DiCaprio links and
text posts).

8. Poor Leo: Feeling bad for a movie star
His Twitter account didn’t receive much engagement. Leonardo DiCaprio
the brand was not as engaging as Leonardo DiCaprio the meme.
Between Oscars 2015 and 2016, engagement for the star remained low.
The Crowdbabble infographic above shows a 2.3% engagement rate
and a very low number of total tweets for the period.

9. The Legion of Poor Leo Fans
During the show, win or lose, the
hundreds of thousands of Tumblrers,
Redditors, and aggregator readers would
react in a huge way.
Before Oscars 2016, DiCaprio had what
every movie star(‘s publicity team)
dreams of: an engaged, young, and
massive following online. Every year,
Poor Leo memes grew in popularity.
The Poor Leo meme became a sort of
Mayan doomsday clock ticking down to
the next Oscars. During the show, win or
lose, the hundreds of thousands of
Tumblrers, Redditors, and aggregator
readers would react in a huge way.

10. Crowdbabble’s Analytics and Leo’s Surge
For the official @LeoDiCaprio on Twitter, excitement over his
long-awaited Oscar translated into a concrete and dramatic spike
in engagement. The Crowdbabble graph below shows
engagement — likes, comments, and retweets — before and
after the show. Can you spot his tweet about his Oscar win?

11. Crowdbabble’s Analytics and Leo’s Surge
The giant engagement spike is the response to @LeoDiCaprio’s post-
win message to fans. His tweet about winning attracted 367,729
engagements from more than 100,000 Twitter users within three days.
At the time of press, two weeks later, engagement had snowballed.

12. Tweet Engagement Metrics
This year, almost 4% of engagement with DiGiorno on Twitter is comprised of mentions and each tweet receives an
average of 77.8 retweets or favourites. Though overall favourites and retweets were high last year — as users
scrambled to capture the offensive tweet — now DiGiorno’s ability to capture its followers’ attention is stable and
consistently high. Almost a third of the messages the brand sends receive between 10 and 49 retweets, with 4%
going viral at more than 100, as shown below.

13. Tweet Engagement Metrics
Engagement with the tweet is now up to 955,465 retweets and likes combined. That’s quite Titantic.

14. He won the Oscar. Now what?
Now that DiCaprio has his Oscar, the running Poor Leo joke is over. The thrill
is gone: each Oscar run from now on will have much lower stakes.
Subsequent awards seasons are unlikely to generate the thousands of meme
posts and comments on Tumblr and Reddit that they did before the win.
Is Validated Leo – the movie star who now really does have everything – as
likeable as Poor Leo? More importantly, is he as meme-able?
Engagement with DiCaprio’s account, from March 3 to March 7, is back down
to 0%.Perhaps DiCaprio’s massive Poor Leo fandom will find a new way to
celebrate Validated Leo. The thousands of social media users who enjoyed
the Poor Leo meme might wait in suspense each awards season to see if the
win becomes a streak.
Maybe the actor will begin choosing roles that do not end with unjust horror in
candlelit crypts or creepy mental hospitals — characters who get what they
want (the dawn of a new Strutting Leo era on screen).
Maybe Reddit and Tumblr users will find some other void in DiCaprio’s life to
fixate on, and Poor Leo will re-emerge…