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UPDATED: Nielsen’s national ratings have come in, and the 81st Annual Academy Awards on ABC averaged 36.3 million viewers with a 12.1 rating among adults 18-49 on Sunday. It increased viewership by 13% by total audience over last year when both slumped to a record low. But this was still the third least viewed Oscar telecasts on record.
In a 2009 to 2008 comparison, the Oscars built its ratings and reach by 4.3 million viewers (36.3 vs. 32.0 million), 13% among adults 18-49 (12.1 vs. 10.7) and as high as 22% among men 18-34 (8.9 vs. 7.3). So Oscars producers Larry Mark and Bill Condon, as well as host Hugh Jackman, and director Roger Goodman, and designer David Rockwell, did AMPAS proud by at least reversing the recent downward ratings and viewership spiral.
Earlier today, Nielsen’s overnight metered market ratings showed a 6% ratings jump in the 50 or so biggest U.S. markets over 2008. New York delivered the largest rating Sunday (34.1/49 share), followed by Chicago (31.2/46) and Los Angeles (28.1/44). For the night, ABC beat the combined household delivery of CBS, NBC and Fox by roughly 30%.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Amazing how brain dead America is that one third of them would watch this show and not turn it off.
best show in years. loved the way they didn’t play music if a speech ran long. congrats to Larry Mark and Bill Condon for making the night one to remember.
It was a FANTASTIC show, the most fun awards show in years.
Even with the ratings “boost” it is still one of the three least viewed telecasts.
The only complaint I had about the broadcast (other than disrespecting the Best Song nominees by cutting them down but also making us sit through that ill-conceived Jackman-Beyonce number) was that Goodman’s direction made it difficult to see the In Memoriam screen and exactly who was on it. First he failed to zoom in on it in time for us to see Cyd Charisse, then he kept zooming back to show us that yes, Queen Latifah was actually singing the song! I’d kind of already figured that out, guy.
The Commenters on this website are some of the most cynical depressing people I’ve ever seen. If you all hate the film industry so much, why bother to write about it? Spend your time saving the whales or saving Darfur. I bet you people would be great at parties- that is if you were ever invited to any…
America…starved for mindless diversion.
Maybe it wasn’t the show, but the nominees…
Rourke Vs. Penn Outcome
Slumdog vs the other movies
Kate Winslett 5th Nomination
Brangelina Vs. Jennifer
Heath Ledger
The production sucked…but the tabloids will have a field day with sidebar stories
This year was not nearly as bad as what Nikki and the boards have been writing. It was a beautiful stage and moved at a better pace then in a number of years. There are a lot of changes that will be adopted in years to come. The bore was that there was no mystery in the selections. There are simply too many awards in the weeks leading up to the Oscars.
The major failure was the in memoriam. It was so bad as to be disrespectful.
Finally an Oscar telecast that seemed to place more importance on the the nominees and the winners than on the show itself. It felt like a celebration of movies and their many parts rather than a celebration of some harried guys trying to put on a tv awards show.
I enjoyed the show very much. I agree, best show in years. Was just as long as past shows but didn’t feel it.
It wasn’t what we all hoped for, but the writing didn’t make the sucking sound of a vacuum in space. Ms. Finke, I agree–where were the clips? Having said that, I thought the opening number was at least passable (and the “low-budget” theme well executed) and Jackman acquitted himself admirably–NO ONE wanted this gig but he managed to make it appreciably better than the last several years. And the pacing–which they didn’t “enforce” but still made it try to move–meant that I shut my television off before midnight. Hallelujah.
(P.S. Comic book fans as a whole aren’t Oscar types. They’re the type that look up the winners on the Net in the morning. They’ll have no trouble with Jackman as Wolverine come Spring.)
I liked the show. There were a lot of good developments, like having past acting nominees give individual speeches before presenting the award. It connected the past to the future, and it made the show more personal. It also added more drama to an award whose outcome is now largely known or, at most, down to two contenders, due to the glut of awards ceremonies. And it was very perceptive for the producers to recognize that the audience would only want to see this for the acting awards. There were also fewer montages, and no one was played off.
My negatives were there were times when the technical director wasn’t thinking of the audience at home. For example, during the in memoriam there should have been an in line cut so that we could see Queen Latifah, the Kodak theater audience, and a screen showing the photos of the people who’d passed, all at the same time. Instead, we got a very fragmented, unsatisfying segment.
For next year I hope they hire a Broadway lyricist to write the opening number and any other musical set pieces they attempt to stage. I’m surprised Larry Mark and Bill Condon, both guys with roots in New York theater, didn’t do it this time around. Perhaps they were not allowed to? (cough cough Vilanch, WGA?, cough cough). And it’s time to stop renewing Vilach’s contract. Give someone else that job and see what he can do.
You know, the Academy Awards are really nothing more than a glamourized annual sales meeting where performance awards are doled out for services rendered. The objective is to hand out the trinkets, not build a fluffy TV show around it. I found this train wreck very hard to watch and particularly disrespectful with the poor camera work during the obit reel.
It speaks volumes that the classiest moment of the entire broadcast was when France’s favorite clown, Jerry Lewis, a man who build his career making fun of handicapped, picked up his trophy.
Well, they went for the big cities to carry the night. Pretty much ignoring everyone else.
Hey Nikki,
Great coverage last night. I don’t agree with you on everything,:) thought the show was actually quite good this year, but you did a great job!
cheers
With the economy in a freefall nobody can afford to go out anymore, so more people were at home — that’s my guess as to why ratings were higher than last year. My only guess, ’cause I thought the show was boring.
Agree it was good, especially using Jackman like the host of documentary walking the audience through each stage of production.
I didn’t feel particularly compelled to check out any of the movies I haven’t already seen, though.
Not sure if that’s the fault of the Oscar telecast. They have to work with the material they’re given. So for what it was not a bad show.
I thought i was inspired: The clipped along, the sets were nice, I thought Jackman did a great job, considering they were treading some new ground. Plus, we didn’t have to watch 1/2 hour tributes to the best picture category. Yes, some of the song/dance numbers were long, but overall, much more interesting show than usual.
Damn. I mean it’s good news generally that people watched. It’s bad news in that it ratifies a host of bad production decisions.
Next year? MORE dance numbers.
i agree, best show in years, good for Condon, Mark, and Jackman, who was ALL CLASS.
in your face, Finke!
What show were you people watching that “hated” it…Explain what your ideal show would’ve been. It’s an awards show, it’s fun, it’s dancing, it’s gay. Get your head out of your ass and just stop being so damn cynical and enjoy the show.
Best show i’ve seen in a LONG time
8:30 p.m. – Viewers: 37.70 million, A18-49: 12.2/28
9:00 p.m. – Viewers: 35.28 million, A18-49: 11.5/26
9:30 p.m. – Viewers: 32.55 million, A18-49: 10.9/25
10:00 p.m. – Viewers: 32.48 million, A18-49: 11.2/27
10:30 p.m. – Viewers: 29.86 million, A18-49: 10.2/26
They lost nearly 8 million (20 percent) of their viewers over the cource of the telecast. That doesn’t bode well for next year.
Nikki, I liked the show and so did most people I saw on Facebook and online in general. At the very least, it was much better than what we’ve become accustomed to.
That said, the overall viewership of the show might not be the best measure of how much viewers liked it. Overall viewership can be affected by the crop of nominees and how many people saw the pictures they were in (and how that was different from, say, last year). A better measure would be audience flow from half hour to half hour and how that compares to years past. I hope someone somewhere does that analysis.
I thought it was a great step in the right direction.
Things I loved; The set. The band on stage. The former Academy Award winners personally addressing the actors who were nominated.
Things I hated; I really got angry that we saw more close ups of the band during the In Memorium section than we did of the screen with the people’s names who died. That was a horror. They needed to show what was on screen and not a moving close up of a trombone player. I also HATED during best score that they once again showed close ups of the band. We should have listened to the band while we watched the clip montage of each nominated score. That was pretty horrible.
I liked Jackman. Didn’t love the songs. The musical number with Beyonce was a mess in my opinion.
Still, I liked how they attempted to shake the rust off of a lot of the previous shows.
My thoughts are they need to once and for all cut all the short film awards. No one sees any of these films unless they are at festivals or in the business or they are tacked on to Wall E.
That would shave at least 45 minutes off the show time.
They need to get this show in under 3 hours and allow winners a chance to speak. I’d cut those awards and the technical awards mention and spend more time on the major awards and having former winners or special people pay homage to each nominee like they did last night before announcing the winner.
In a strange way it felt like everyone nominated was really acknowledged last night by bringing out the people to introduce them.