Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Jolie at the Oscars: The leg that roared

There's going out on a limb, and there's your limb going out. Or you putting out your limb. Angelina Jolie did, and now it's leg-endary.

Jolie put out her right leg repeatedly before and during Sunday's Academy Award presentations, and it instantly became an object for satire and sharing. Funny guy Jim Rash, one of the recipients of the best adapted screenplay Oscar, struck a Joliesque pose onstage in his tux.

Now, it has become an Internet meme - with a Twitter account: @AngiesRightLeg. As of 5 p.m. Monday, the account had drawn more than 19,000 followers. One tweet: "Left leg and I talked - everything's cool. Next Oscars, she gets the slit." One writer, Rob Kutner, tweeted: "BREAKING: Fake Twitter account @AngiesRightLeg given $9 kajillion book advance, CBS series that's already been pre-canceled."

Twitter reported a spike during Jolie's legfest of about 3,400 tweets per second, but that was dwarfed by Cirque du Soleil, whose aerial ballet drew traffic in excess of 18,000 per second.

By Monday, a new word had been created: legbombing. Al Roker and Ann Curry did a gam-off on Today, for goodness' sake.

Visually, the leg has run away with itself. The creative aggregators at BuzzFeed ran the top 10 photographs of the actress' dextral limb. The Tumblr account oldghost ran a brilliant doctored image (http://bit.ly/xxfsiQ) in which both Jolie pins were extended, revealing an unsuspected cowboy saunter. BuzzFeed ran it, too, getting more than 50,000 hits.

Throughout the Web, photo manipulators were showing Jolie's leg setting foot on the moon, stepping into Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, crossing the Delaware with Washington, and extending from the Statue of Liberty, among many, many other recontextualizations (an E! Online gallery is here: http://eonli.ne/zXwCnT).

Jolie's leg was not the only celebrity body part to be so celebrated. Jennifer Lopez appeared to show unexpected extents of areolar frontier, and now an account is titled @JLosNipple. And Bradley Cooper's novel lip hair has two accounts: @CoopersMustache and @BradleysStache.

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