The 88th Academy Awards will go down in history for more than one reason.

The biggest awards ceremony of the year took place in Los Angeles last night. It gathered some of the biggest and best film industry figures from around the world and generated an incredible amount of hype on social in doing so.

The Red Carpet

The festivities began with a star-studded red carpet. The dresses this year did not disappoint with designers represented from across the globe.

According to the online audience, Lady Gaga, Cate Blanchett, Sophie Turner and Saoirse Ronan were the best dressed of the night.

In terms of the designers, Armani accounted for 17% of the overall conversation with actresses Cate Blanchett and Naomi Watts both donning robes from the designer.

They were joined by various high profile men sporting Armani from Vice President Joe Biden to Leonardo DiCaprio and the young Room star Jacob Tremblay.

Rocking it

This year’s Oscars faced huge criticism over the lack of diversity in the nominations. Will Smith, Spike Lee and various other big names boycotted the ceremony, and the #OscarSoWhite hashtag has been prolific on Twitter since the nominations were announced.

The evening’s host, Chris Rock, definitely did not shy away from the issue and to say his opening monologue was filled with contentious jokes would be an understatement.

This Chris Rock monologue is like a Game of Thrones preview. #Oscars — Jon Benson (@joncbenson) February 29, 2016

Despite this, social seemed to be a fan of the straight shooting comedian – he boasted an impressive 76% positive score for sentiment-categorized mentions following the speech.

Directly after his monologue ended we noticed he had outnumbered the volume of tweets for the entire red carpet coverage.

And the winner is…

We probably don’t need to tell you who the big winner from the 2016 Oscars was, but we will anyway. For the first time in his career, following six nominations, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Academy Award.

Internet revellers around the world will be rejoicing and we’re pretty sure the number of ‘Leo memes’ will send the internet into overdrive. He even got a (nice) tweet from Kanye West.

Finally!!! Our guy!!! We’re so so happy for Leo!!! — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 29, 2016

The moment was undoubtedly the biggest mention spike of the night.

#Oscars: @Leodicaprio almost broke the internet when he bagged the award for best actor – his first ever Oscar pic.twitter.com/9EeRkJfHyL — Brandwatch React (@BW_React) February 29, 2016

In other non-Leo related news, Spotlight picked up the award for best picture. This may have come as a shock seeing as a lot of the predictions poised the Revenant or Mad Max to win.

Having said that, the visual feast that was Mad Max: Fury Road picked up a whopping six awards during the course of the night.

#Oscars: The string of wins for Mad Max has earned it over 26,000 mentions in the past 6 hours pic.twitter.com/xsAzvhn8Vw — Brandwatch React (@BW_React) February 29, 2016

Other big winners of the night included Brie Larson for her role as an entrapped single mother in Room.

She received over 57,000 mentions on Twitter and a 97% positive sentiment score on sentiment-categorized tweets. Her nine year old co-star, Jacob Tremblay, made hearts melt throughout the ceremony.

Music, Maestro

The British artist Sam Smith went home a happy man with his Oscar for best original song. The singer also commended his achievement of being the first openingly gay man to win an Oscar, although he may have misinterpreted a quote made by Sir Ian McKellen.

The first (Leo’s was second) standing ovation of the night went to Lady Gaga following her performance of the song, ‘Til it happens to you’.

The powerful rendition was felt both those in the crowd and online, and the singer accumulated a staggering 190,000 during the course of the night.

Only another 12 months until the 89th Academy Awards, so hang tight until then.

In the meantime follow @BW_React and tell us what you thought of this year’s Oscars.