Despite a surprise ending that set social media ablaze, Sunday’s lengthy Academy Awards telecast on ABC drew relatively poor ratings.
Early numbers from Nielsen have the show off 4 percent from comparable stats in 2016, averaging an overnight 22.4 rating among metered market households. That measurement is shy of last year’s show, which saw its overnight score (a 23.4 rating) ultimately translate to 34.43 million viewers.
The numbers sank even though host Jimmy Kimmel received generally favorable reviews from critics and the stunning best-picture fiasco proved to be the kind of talking point award shows thrive upon.
So why the fall-off? The blame can be spread across several factors: The box-office appeal of this year’s top contenders was relatively low. Many viewers simply have not seen films like “Moonlight” and “La La land.” When you don’t see the films, you have little investment in the show and/or the jokes directed at them.
Also, the political tone of awards season was undoubtedly a turnoff for some viewers who have grown weary of watching liberal celebrities tear into president Donald Trump. If Kimmel’s performance as host could be faulted for anything it’s that he went to the political well way too often, despite our humble warning to avoid that pitfall. As one commentator on our online sites wrote, it’s an awards show, “not a town hall meeting.”
It didn’t help that the telecast came in at a bloated three hours and 49 minutes, ranking as the longest in 10 years. Nielsen ratings are averaged out over the duration of a program and there’s no doubt that some viewers fled long before the “Moonlight”-“La La Land” screw-up.
The length of Oscar shows remains a particularly galling issue for this TV critic. If other awards shows can come in on time, why can’t the Oscars? There seems to be a supremely arrogant approach by the Academy and producers who simply refuse to self-edit themselves. You can’t tell us that we needed every one of those candy-dropping bits, or all of those Kimmel-vs.-Matt Damon sequences. (We also advised against distributing food to the audience, which is now a very old joke).
But as the Hollywood Reporter points out, the Oscars show remains a lucrative flagship for ABC, which reaped north of a reported $115 million in ad revenue from this year’s ceremony. And it is still likely to avoid being the least-watched Oscars on record. That dubious distinction belongs to the 2008 ceremony hosted by Jon Stewart, which came in just shy of 32 million viewers after a 20.8 overnight rating.
