Ellen DeGeneres’ iconic Oscar selfie starring Hollywood A-list stars turns 10. Has the image aged well?

The famous Oscar selfie that Ellen Degeneres took while hosting the Oscars in 2014 just turned 10. The iconic selfie featured a bevy of A-list Hollywood stars and was then posted by Degeneres on X (then still known as Twitter) and broke records for being the most reposted post ever on the micro-blogging site. But over the last 10 years, the iconic selfie has not aged that well with many celebrities who featured in the photo fading from the public eye due to some sort of controversy.

It was later speculated that the selfie - which appeared to be one greatest impromptu action played out on live television - was a planned one. Turns out Samsung had initiated it to market its new recently launched mobile phone, a fact that the company denied later. But rumours around the genius marketing gimmick never died. 

Who all featured in the selfie?

In the middle of hosting the Oscar Awards 2014, Degeneres went into the audience and asked some of the stars occupying the front rows to come in the frame for a selfie.

The result was that stars like Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Jenifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Lupita Nyong' O and Channing Tatum squeezed in for an epic selfie.

10 years on....

It’s been 10 years since that epic selfie and a lot has changed in Hollywood since then. Revisiting the moment is like going through a time capsule.

Some of those photographed have been working steadily ever since. For others, things changed. Especially for Spacey, who was fired from House of Cards in 2018 amid the #MeToo movement after facing sexual misconduct allegations from multiple men.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were a powerful couple back then. They married the same year but separated in 2016 and got embroiled in a bitter legal battle over the custody of their six children and the ownership of their estate in France - which had served as their wedding venue. Pitt also won his first Oscar in 2019 for his performance in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Bradley Cooper has now become an Oscar mainstay. Over the past decade he has earned multiple Oscar nominations but so far hasn't been able to win the golden statue. He will return to next week’s Academy Awards as a nominee for Maestro – a film he directed, produced and stars in.

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Lawrence was also a nominee for her performance in American Hustle at Oscar 2014. She went on to earn another Oscar nod the following year for her performance in Joy and has appeared in a film every year since. She also became a mom along the way.

Leto won an Oscar that year for Dallas Buyers Club, as did Nyong’o for 12 Years a Slave. Leto has since toggled between roles in various blockbuster movies, the 2022 mini-series WeCrashed. There are also rumours about him being a leader of a cult but those perhaps are not to be taken too seriously till the actor himself confirms it.

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In 2014, Degeneres at the time was still hosting her long-running daytime talk show The Ellen Degeneres Show. The show aired it's final episode in 2022 not before courting controversy where DeGeneres was accused of being an enabler of toxic workplace culture on the show's set.

In 2014, Meryl Streep broke her own record when she earned her 18th Oscar nomination for August: Osage County. It’s a record that became Degeneres’s bargaining chip when she approached Streep to help her “break another record” for the most retweets, sparked by the epic selfie. Streep continues to create records with her stupendous performances in films as well as series making her one of the most iconic actors of all time.

Streep lost out to Cate Blanchett that year but the selfie wound up generating 2.7 million retweets and two million likes, and it remains one of pop culture’s starriest images to date.