Back in February 2022, Bilge Ebiri wrote an excellent essay for Vulture breaking down how the Academy Awards trying to be self-hating will never solve the show's perceived "problems." It was a fantastic rebuke against the deluge of jokes in the ceremony at the expense of the long runtimes of Best Picture nominees and other gags seemingly directed at folks who'd never tune into the Academy Awards in 2024. Ebiri astutely pointed out that many of these problems stemmed from the Oscars constantly trying to be "broader" to correct supposed issues with the show's viewership. However, this writer flat-out called out this perception for what it was: false. Ebiri pointed out how the Oscars still dwarf all other non-sports television programming in terms of viewership (more on that shortly). Yet, ABC and the Academy continue to fret over the Oscars no longer being viewed by as many people in 2024 as they were in 1998.
The folks behind this award show need to heed the words of Ebiri. The Oscars don't have a viewership problem and it's bizarre that this conceit persists year after year.
Thanks to a helpful chart compiled by Ratings Ryan (based on first-hand sources like Variety news articles from when the ceremonies first aired or Nielsen ratings reports), one gets a helpful glimpse into how many viewers and (in the case of pre-1974 shows) households this show has regularly dragged up. Looking at the history of these numbers, one can see that the Oscars don't have a viewership problem as defined by the Academy and ABC. For the purposes of this piece, let's just look at the shows from the 1974 awards onward, which counted viewers (the same metric used to measure Oscar viewership today).
For most years before the year 2000, the Oscars regularly garnered 40+ million viewers, though the show could sink to sub-40 million viewers on several ceremonies when the Best Picture nominees weren't universally seen. Unsurprisingly, the ceremony where Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture scored more eyeballs than the ceremony where Out of Africa was up for the same award! The least-viewed of these pre-2000 occasions was the 59th Academy Awards ceremony, with 37.19 million viewers tuning in to watch Platoon score Best Picture. These ceremonies existed in an era without streaming programming competition, DVRs, and the highest-profile HBO shows you could watch were Maximum Security and Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.
In March 2003, CBS News ran a piece proclaiming "TV Ratings For Oscars Plunge" in response to the 74th Academy Awards scoring 33.1 million viewers, the lowest viewership of the Oscars at that point. The outlet pointed out that the then-recent finale of Joe Millionaire outpaced the Oscars in viewership, a reflection of just how hot reality programming was in this era. Whispers about troubling Academy Awards viewership had abounded before, but now there were constant eyeballs on the numbers this show generated. In the age of the internet, people had more accessibility to the historical records of Nielsen viewership for Oscar ceremonies. Meanwhile, news outlets had a fresh virtual landscape they could make money off of by delivering pieces with eye-catching headlines like "the Oscars in viewership turmoil."
As the 2000s continued on, Oscar viewership hit another low in February 2008 with 32 million viewers, which The Hollywood Reporter dubbed "a ratings flop" for the kind of numbers a FOX executive would kill for in 2024. Despite being a "ratings flop," Nielsen still reported at the end of the year that the Academy Awards were the most-watched TV program of the year that didn't pertain to sports or the Olympics. More people were still tuning into the Oscars than to watch that season's final two contestants of American Idol rub shoulders with the star of The Love Guru. As the years went on, the Oscars continued to score as the biggest non-sports telecast of a typical year, such as in 2013 or in 2015. Even with these accomplishments, outlets like Time Magazine were still running headlines about how "TV Viewers Deserted the Oscars This Year".
Interestingly, the Academy Awards ceremonies fended off sinking below the nadir viewership of the 80th Academy Awards until the 90th Academy Awards, which became the first-ever Oscars to secure below 30 million viewers with 26.54 million viewers. Since then, the Oscars have never returned to the 30+ million viewership domain. The last three shows scored in the 16.675-19.5 million viewership range, with the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021 securing an all-time low viewership of 10.540 million viewers. Chalk that one up to the first year of COVID-19 leaving both everyone unable to watch the new movies and the Best Picture nominees from scoring much of a pop culture footprint.
There's no question the Oscars have slipped in viewership, with the 96th Academy Awards being down by roughly 47% from the 37.30 million viewers who tuned into the 87th Academy Awards nine years ago. However, that's more emblematic of how live TV viewership trends have shifted than anything else. Unless you're the Super Bowl, people are tuning into live TV less and less in an age of YouTube and streaming. For comparisions sake, let's look at the average viewership of NCIS, one of the biggest scripted shows on TV. This program averaged 16.61 million viewers for the 2015-2016 season. For the 2022-23 season, it plunged down to 9.86 million viewers on average. Across both of those seasons, NCIS was the third-most watched scripted program on television. It's just that the numbers needed to reach that spot have changed drastically in just a handful of years.
The same phenomenon is happening to the Oscars, which (save for that 2021 ceremony) still ranked as the most-watched non-sports telecast of 2022 and of 2023. Now, all these numbers and analysis shouldn't be perceived as bootlicking for ABC and the Academy, but rather a call to action to those entities. There's clearly no real problem going on with Oscars viewership that's exclusive to this awards show. Dwindling live numbers to this program are a result of shifts in how people consume television, not folks inherently abandoning the Oscars. However, this means that the folks behind this awards show need to focus less on "improving the ratings" and concentrate on matters that would actually benefit this event. Instead of straining to conjure up "viral moments" meant to boost viewership, let's get those Oscar categories for stunt performers and voice actors finally implemented into the show! Let's make gender-neutral acting categories! Let's ban anyone from the Oscar who (in the future) introduces the Best Animated Feature category with some snide remark about "did you let your kids fill out the voting form for this one?" There are plenty of ways the Oscars need to improve. Clearly, as Bilge Ebiri pointed out two years ago, viewership woes are not one of them.
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