Tube Trends: Assessing The Pre-Oscars YouTube Cycle
Just days away from this year’s Oscars, very little feels decided in terms of top awards.
Sinners and One Battle After Another appear locked in a dead heat to see who wins Best Picture (and Best Director) honors. Those films’ stars are also earning plenty of buzz, especially as the Best Actor race seemingly narrows to a choice between Leonardo DiCaprio (OBAA) and Michael B. Jordan (Sinners).
Social video, and particularly YouTube, has become a key place for these late debates as promotion cycles pick up and movie fans weigh in to voice support for their favorites. This year was no different, with some key trends emerging — as highlighted by Tubular Labs looking at data from the 40 days leading up to this year’s event vs. the same window last year.
Oscars Buzz In “Shorts” Supply
Aligning with overarching changes to viewer behavior, the Oscars YouTube talk has also leaned toward Shorts. Last year, videos under two minutes long (primarily Shorts format) accounted for 82% of YouTube views in that 40-day window leading up to the Oscars, while videos running 20 minutes or longer accounted for 7.4% of views.
This year, videos under two minutes long accounted for 78% of YouTube views in that stretch — a similar number to last year — but longer-format videos made up just 3.8% of the total views for Oscar-related videos.
Trending Figures
YouTube’s biggest names going into the 2025 Oscars included Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Demi Moore, with Grande and Erivo riding on the success of the first Wicked movie. But the same wasn’t true this year, despite Wicked: For Good hitting theaters last fall.
This year’s standouts include DiCaprio (for One Battle After Another) and Emma Stone (for her performance in Bugonia), as well as a surprise trending “character”: The Glambot.
The Glambot has quickly become a staple of awards season, showing off celebrity looks in a unique and made-for-sharing way. On its own, the Glambot has has driven over 1 billion cross-platform video views before the Oscars for each of the last two years.
Among the biggest drivers of Glambot buzz both this year and last: Creator Haley Kalil.
In the 40-day window leading up to the Oscars, Tubular shows that she’s accounted for five of the 20 most-seen videos about the Glambot this year (including No. 1, with 45.1 million views) and four of the top five on YouTube alone. While she was still a big part of Glambot talk last year, with three of the top 20, she’s made it an even bigger part of her awards-related content in 2026.
Food & Drink Videos Grow Oscars’ Share
Most YouTube views around the Oscars are still coming from expected creator genres like entertainment, news and general creators. But this year has also seen a growing footprint for food & drink creators in the Oscars conversation as well.
Tubular data reveals food & drink videos about the Oscars have seen views increase by 31x year-over-year, led primarily by Hot Ones’ interview with nominee Teyana Taylor on First We Feast.
The interview isn’t the only place where food & drink creators, brands and publishers can get involved in the Oscars conversation, though. Playing into Oscars parties and how-to content, the genre also has an opportunity to create themed recipes for the night, use movies for inspiration for Oscars menus, and for those with access, put a focus on the food and drink being featured at after-parties during all of awards season.
International Trends, Filmmaker Spotlight
The Oscars may take place in the United States, but it’s increasingly grown into an international event. More than half of this year’s pre-Oscars YouTube videos came from accounts based outside of the U.S. — a country list led by India yet again, as social video continues to grow in the country to potentially rival domestic outputs here.
Separately this year, Indian-American filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir is nominated for two separate documentaries, The Perfect Neighbor (feature) and The Devil Is Busy (short). Gandbhir herself has generated about one million views in the Oscars lead-up this year, led by various clips of her interviews with The Daily Show.
