Audience for 95th Oscars rebounds slightly to 18.7 million
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Whether it was the drama of The Slap or blockbusters headlining the best picture race, a large audience was back at the Oscars this year.
The 95th Academy Awards, which aired Sunday night on ABC, was watched by an estimated 18.7 million people, according to preliminary Fast National Live+Same Day numbers released Monday by ABC. That’s up 12% from last year’s show, but still lower than most years.
The evening’s main counterprogramming, the season finale of “The Last of Us”, attracted 8.2 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max. The show began at 9 p.m. EST, an hour after the Oscars began.
A frequent criticism of the Oscars is that the show celebrates films that don’t have broad appeal. However, this year was markedly different, with two billion-dollar blockbuster sequels in the mix: “Top: Gun Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” were both nominated for Best Picture. Angela Bassett was nominated for a Marvel film for the first time. Even the winning film, A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, grossed over $100 million at the global box office and played in theaters for months.
For many years, the Oscars were often the second most watched television event of the year, behind the Super Bowl. As of 2018, the Oscars telecast had never fallen below 30 million viewers, according to Nielsen records. In 1998 the 55 million people who watched the Titanic being cleaned had high water levels.
From the 43.7 million watched in 2014, viewership steadily declined to 26.5 million in 2018, then 29.6 million in 2019, and 23.6 million in 2020. million. It peaked at 16.6 million last year, the second lowest rated show ever.
Jimmy Kimmel, who presided over the ceremony in 2017 and 2018, returned to host the show, parachuting onto the stage of the Dolby Theatre. The show also included performances by pop stars such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
Broadcast television viewership has gone down across the board in the streaming era, and award shows exemplify this. The show claimed a total of 27.4 million social interactions across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and was the No. 1 trending topic worldwide on Twitter for its duration.
As of Monday afternoon, Ke Hui Quan’s acceptance speech had been viewed more than 1.3 million times on YouTube, and Brendan Fraser’s up to 2.6 million.
The ABC broadcast also had 1.8 million views of the American Sign Language live stream.
Oscar producer Glenn Weiss told The Hollywood Reporter after the show, “What we wanted to do was go out and execute a show that people would really enjoy and a show that people would talk about.” “We think we nailed it. I sure hope (Monday) brings good news on the ratings front, but either way, I think it was a successful evening.
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