Ellen's Most-Retweeted Oscars Selfie: Samsung Made It Happen

By now you've likely seen the "selfie" photo taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the 2014 Oscars. What you might not know is the process that lead up to it – and no, that didn't just happen to be Ellen's everyday phone taking a selfie for the fun of it. It is true, on the other hand, that the photo did turn out quite well due to the relative excellence of the device at hand.

The smartphone Ellen was using was the Samsung Galaxy Note III. This is the same device you'll see in our Samsung Galaxy Note III Review from last year, even ringing in with the same color body – white.

You'll find the Tweet itself to be wishing for Bradley Cooper to have a longer arm to capture the people that couldn't quite make it into the pic – that's Jared Leto on the left there.

If you weren't watching the Oscars, you might also assume that the photo was taken during a break in the action onstage. Instead, it was during the main action. Ellen walked up to Meryl Streep to deliver the following speech:

"Meryl, here's my idea, ok, so you were nominated – it's a record-breaking 18 times, right? So I thought we would try to break another record right now with the most re-tweets of a photo. So right now I'm going to take a picture of us, and we'll see if we can break the record for the most retweets – " – Ellen DeGeneres

"Get her in – *points to Julia Roberts*" – Meryl Streep

From there the collection of people in the photo snowballed. Ellen also took a number of other selfie photos during the broadcast with the same device.

According to Ad Age, ABC worked with Twitter and Twitter's Amplify with Samsung as a sponsor of "a series of 10 promoted tweets" which featured "celebrity selfies."

While this deal spoken of by Ad Age limits these photos to the Green Room, they also suggest that these tweets "build on a broader pact between ABC and Samsung that also includes sponsorship of ABC's behind-the-scenes Oscar content on its Watch ABC app."

Based on Ellen's extremely visible usage of the Galaxy Note III during broadcast, the chances of her doing so without prompting seem too small to be real. That doesn't mean it wasn't entertaining, of course – and Twitter received it all very, very well.

NOTE: According to Slate, Ellen also had an iPhone with her that she used to take photos backstage.