Ellen's Oscar Selfie Rapidly Becomes the Most Retweeted Image of All Time

Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres at last night's Oscars, the "selfie" just got another huge promotional boost after being named 2013's Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.

In case you somehow missed it, host DeGeneres paused the ceremony while Oscar-nominated actor Bradley Cooper snapped a selfie, accompanied by a casual collection of Hollywood's A-list.

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

(From left to right: half of Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, some Channing Tatum, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Peter Nyong'o and Angelina Jolie's eyes).

DeGeneres posted the picture on Twitter and Twitter promptly went crazy; it was retweeted 80,000 times in three minutes. In less than an hour it had far-outstripped the previous most retweeted image, a photo of Barack and Michelle Obama embracing after the 2012 election with the caption "Four More Years."

Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

To be fair, the Obama photo wasn't a selfie. At the time of this writing, the Oscar selfie has been retweeted over 2.7 million times while Obama's "Four More Years" has received just fewer than 800,000 retweets.

Related: In Defense of the Selfie