Another Hollywood award show, another all-time low.
“The three-hour-plus broadcast averaged about 23.6 million viewers and a 5.3 rating among adults 18-49, well below the 29.56 million and 7.7 for last year’s awards — which aired two weeks later,” The Hollywood Reporter writes. “The Oscars were down 20 percent year to year in viewers and 31 percent in the key ad-sales demo of adults 18-49.”
Sunday’s show also falls well short of previous ratings lows for the Oscars, set in 2018. That year the telecast averaged 26.54 million viewers and a 6.8 rating in the demo; Sunday was down 11 percent in viewers and 22 percent in adults 18-49 from prior lows.
The Oscars join the Emmy Awards in suffering steep ratings declines. The September 2019 Emmy broadcast on Fox fell by 32 percent in viewers and 29 percent in adults 18-49 from the previous year. By comparison, the declines for January’s Golden Globes (off by 4 percent in viewers and 10 percent in the 18-49 demo) and Grammys (down 6 percent in viewers, 4 percent in the demo) were fairly slight.
Each year, the Academy Awards is worse than the year before. This latest show featured a gaggle of whining celebrities (one of whom went on a lengthy rant about people milking cows).
Brad Pitt complained about President Trump’s impeachment trial, saying “‘They told me I only had 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.” A documentary filmmaker invoked Karl Marx, calling for the “workers of the world” to “unite.” And vegan Joaquin Phoenix went on an weird diatribe about veganism.
“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,” Phoenix said as he accepted his award for “Joker.” “And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.”
“We’re talking about the fight against belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate and control and exploit another with impunity. I think that we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world and many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric world view – the belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources,’ he said.
The Oscars ratings have plunged in the last decade. Back in 2010, the Oscars pulled in 41.3 million viewers. In 2014, viewership hit a high of 43.7 million. But it quickly plunged to the low 30s over the past few years, hitting just 23.6 million this year.