Rebecca Moore remembers why she loves the Oscars and the joy of feeling involved with the action

I used to stay up until five in the morning watching the Oscars. A group of friends and I would prepare snacks, drinks and duvets on the floor for the all-night event We’d even have an afternoon nap to prepare and book the following day off work. One year, my friend who was hosting the show in her terraced-house, splashed out on red bath mats from Asda so we had a pseudo red carpet, complete with champagne, no less.

Being able to glory in the sheer carnival of it all in real-time made us feel somehow part of it, in a way that re-watching the televised highlights the following night could not.

I didn’t even mind sleeping on a blow-up mattress dreaming of all of those other people – those beautiful people on the other side of the Atlantic – swigging champagne (beautifully).

However, in recent years, having moved away from my home town, I have missed every ceremony. This year I’d completely forgotten that it was taking place until The Selfie That Broke Twitter started filling my social media newsfeed on Monday morning and I realised I’d missed the whole sorry affair.

Ellen Degeneres’ picture – including Kevin Spacey, Meryl Streep and Bradgelina – went immediately viral and says something really odd about the whole celeb culture.

Years ago – not that many years ago, mind – actors and actresses seemed not only more distant and inaccessible but also less like one of us.

With social media, and the incessant torrent of selfies we receive daily, it feels different. But there’s also a real sense in which the celebs need us.

We’ve created a feedback loop in which their behaviour is overtly responsive to our reaction. What comes first: our hashtags and retweets or their tweets and pictures?

And what was even odder about that selfie is that at the moment it was taken, approximately twenty trillion other cameras were aimed at the same group of people from different angles.

You can see the side of Angelina’s head in one still-shot as she smiles at Ellen’s phone that is them snapping the picture you’re reweeting on Twitter.

It’s bizarre, made even more bizarre by a miniscule Liza Minelli jumping around at the back trying to get in the shot, like some demented Oompa Loompa in drag. You also know that, like Liza, you’d be upset if after attending the event, you woke up on Monday having not made it into That Picture.

But why should a selfie feel different to the moving images being shot from every conceivable angle in that auditorium?

Probably because celebrity selfies feel more personal: for a split second, we feel special that they have allowed us into their lives, via their mobile phone.

It didn’t matter whether we could see that shot from a hundred different angles on our television screens.

Everyone knows that television lies. An image snapped by the stars themselves, instantly feels more real. Just like walking up a bathroom mat red carpet can almost – almost – feel like the Oscars themselves.