We’re currently awash in Oscar numbers and statistics, but there’s another Oscars number to be taken into account. After much discussion of the Academy as an entity leading up to Sunday night, it seemed like public interest would be high going into the ceremony, particularly given the Leo narrative and some high-grossing nominees like The Revenant, The Martian and Mad Max: Fury Road. But numbers for the Oscars telecast for this year have come in, and the Chris Rock-hosted show fell 6 percent to 34.3 million viewers in preliminary numbers and an eight-year ratings low...
If you haven’t already read Kieran’s analysis of Rock’s hosting stint you definitely should, because he gets at a lot of reasons why the ceremony was so uneven and might have put people off watching. But the most telling aspect of the ceremony’s ratings is that the 18-49 demographic only dropped 5 percent, which means that much of the lost audience was older viewers...
Sound familiar?
Not surprisingly, organisers of the boycott stemming from the #OscarsSoWhite campaign have been quick to claim credit for the ratings slump, and the New York Times is already helpfully suggesting that the politicization of the awards was the root cause. But the drop this year is in line with broader TV ratings trends. Most shows are down double-digit percentages from 2015, with the Oscars falling less than that.
Once more concrete numbers come out we'll get a better idea of what drops in viewership, if any, there were among non-white audiences, but early indications suggest that people tuned out progressively as the show went on, converse to last year. It would be hard to blame anyone for changing the channel during the low-energy second half - making people watching a roomful of millionaires buy cookies is maybe not the best way to appeal to the everyday viewer.
It does make you wonder what discussions are being had about the show behind the scenes. Cheryl Boone Isaacs surely has a contingency plan should the next slate of nminees prove to be just as monochromatic. The Oscars website might already give an indication of AMPAS' next move. Kevin Hart, who helped persuade Rock to host this year, auditioned hard while introducing The Weeknd's performance of "Earned It", giving one of the night's most impassioned pleas for diversity and coming off as a shoo-in for a callback.