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Despite lukewarm critical reception (did you read Deadline’s own live-snarking?), the ratings for the Academy Awards has ABC crowing. The telecast drew an average audience of 41.3 million viewers, which made the Oscars TV’s most watched entertainment broadcast since 2005, according to Nielsen estimates. The awards show apparently wasn’t hurt by the game of chicken that Disney played with Cablevision, one that forced millions of New Yorkers to miss the starting 17 minutes and more of the telecast. (Not to worry: they missed bupkis.) This marks the 2nd year in a row that the Oscars saw a ratings surge. The show was 14% up over the 2009 Oscars, which drew 35.3 million viewers when Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture. That show ranked 13% above the 32 million viewers who watched No Country For Old Men win in 2008 — the lowest rated since Nielsen started measuring the broadcast. Look, the only place this year’s telecast could go was up. Especially with a global blockbuster like Avatar competing against Hurt Locker down to the wire for Best Picture.
The 2010 Oscar ratings continues an overall surge in awards show eyeballs: the Grammy Awards were up 35%, the Golden Globes were up 14.3%, and the People’s Choice Awards were up 15%.
But Tom Sherak should wait to pat himself on the back. The production and direction of last night’s Academy Awards were heavily criticized if not downright ridiculed. For instance, the emphasis by executive producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic on packing in young presenters as a ploy to lower the average age of the audience demographics to what advertisers most prize didn’t pay off. The 18-34 demo was down 3%, while 34-49 was up 9%. Translation: Taylor Lautner, Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, and Kristen Stewart in don’t-blink-or-you-miss-them doses weren’t enough. (The Grammys are the exception, but there artists like Beyonce, Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas take the stage and perform.) Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart instead got stuck in an awkward tribute to the horror genre, which Twilight isn’t. That wasn’t the most serious gaffe. After Lautner mentioned that the last horror film to be recognized by the Oscars was 1973′s The Exorcist, the montage that followed featured a memorable shot of Anthony Hopkins in a Hannibal Lecter mask. Because 1991′s Silence of the Lambs, of course, won Best Picture.
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Too bad the show was so poorly directed. The director missed major moments, like when Martin & Baldwin descended onto the stage, by staying on general crowd shots. Couldn’t they have rehearsed this in the tech run through? Also we missed seeing if Cameron and Bigelow had a moment before she went to receive the Oscar. It’s almost as if the director wanted to avoid showing us the interesting stuff! There were lots of unwarranted cutaways.
Re the young presenters ala Kristen Stewart, this is where you and the majority of the media gets it wrong, especially/particularly in regards to Twilight fans and Kristen. She has an enormous fanbase over 25, and any journalist who cared to get it right would follow her fan Twitter accounts and blogs to see the truth. I’m 35, in graduate school for my teaching masters, and have been following Rob and Kristen for a year now. I’ve made tons of friends my age through Twitter who are as fed up with the quality of the Twilight movies so far as the rest of you. But we see the talent in Rob and Kristen and cannot wait to cheer them on as they tackle knew roles. We love who they are as people, and that is why we tuned in to the Oscars. It’s sheer ignorance on the part of Twi-haters and the media elite to minimize Kristen’s importance in the eyes of her older fanbase.
it’s sheer ignorance on your part to assume your circle of friends is at all emblematic of the general trend.
i am all for anyone supporting whoever they so choose, but i think that you are missing a bigger picture. i don’t mean any offense whatsoever.
You’re speaking for your whole generation? Sorry, old girl, your demo is meaningless when it comes to Twilight. No-one cares what you think and fanning as hard as you do over “Kristen and Rob” will get you nowhere. Cougars have problems because they don’t realize that men in their 40′s are Hawt.
When I went to check out New Moon, there were lot’s of non-teenage women at the movie, and many of them brought dates along, which helped the movie’s final gross. That being said, I myself am a hugh Miley fan, but I didn’t watch the Oscars, knowing someone would film Miley’s snippets, and post them online. Which was true.
By the way, Nikki, are they doing the AND THE WINNER IS… again, instead of the AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…?
Nice blogging. Funny. Witty. Cool. And real.
It’s Monday and the old format is back….!!! Woo hoo….!! Almost makes up for last night’s snoozefest.
Thanks for listening…!!
It’s important to remember that Twilight is quite similar to Star Trek. There’s a group of people who are out of their mind obsessed with the material, everyone else doesn’t care. I honestly think that gay men are fascinated with Taylor Lautner and that’s why he gets so much media attention.
Someone can get only so far on looks. Charisma and acting talent will make the difference for straight males and straight females who aren’t obsessed with the Twilight franchise. He can end up as pre-crazy Tom Cruise or Fabio, talent determines which.
I agree re the lousy direction on last night’s Oscars. There were so many obvious mistakes by whoever was sitting in the control booth, i.e. when a presenter was talking about the camera moving in for a close-up that was supposed to get too close, and the camera didn’t move at all. Or how about that cutaway shot to the audience which was so dark you couldn’t see who was sitting there? How could a director call that shot when he must have been able to see on the monitor that the shot was unlit? Crazy!
Yes! Forgot about those dark shots! Ridiculous directing. Truly, didn’t they schedule a tech run?
The ratings boom is due to all the Avatar fanatics, along with random people who were just curios about Avatar. I am not saying Avatar SHOULD have won but you cant argue with its popularity. The ratings are going to take a MAJOR dive next year with all the people hacked off about another independent film nobody knew about winning.
Just tell it like it is.
HAHA. OK, Johns. OK. Keep thinking that, Buddy. Avatar is THAT important that it is the reason people watched the Oscars. Whatever you say!…
Um, Jay? Johns is right. Whenever there’s a really huge-grossing film up for Best Picture, ratings at the Oscars go up. That’s a fact.
Actually, yeah. It is.
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Too bad these TV Executive geniuses did not stream the show over the internet. This is the first time I missed the ceremony. OSCAR.COM or HULU should have streamed or at least replayed the show online. But what do I know, they are the geniuses!
Yeah it was terribly directed. Why did they linger so long on the stage or wide shots of the audience right before ad breaks? Why didn’t they get a close up of the actors introducing each best pic nominee (you could barely tell who some where!). Worst telecast of the oscars i’ve seen in a very long time.
Such a shame this large audience was subjected to such poor direction. When you place an actor between the camera and the backs of the audience heads they go from being stars to hired help. Next year please rehearse the shots.
Agree too with the comments on poor direction. Another key shot that was missed was when the seven actors came out in tribute to John Hughes. We saw a high shot from house left so we could tell there were multiple people, and we saw closeups of each, but there wasn’t a wide shot from the front of all seven until the segment was well underway. An opportunity to pan the seven and show us what the audience could see with this surprise presentation was missed.
The biggest clear error was during the opening NPH number when specific people were called out in song, with multiple shots of them each sitting in the dark. Lame.
The show really was not very exciting to watch. Hopefully the producers will do a better job next year.
I was so disappointed in this year’s Oscar and felt such an existential dread that I had serious trouble not stabbing myself that night.
The show couldn’t have been more lifeless, more driven by the mighty dollar.
PLEASE! STOP TRYING TO LURE YOUNG AUDIENCES WITH ACTORS WHO APPEAR IN VAMPIRE MOVIES. Even the actors themselves (Kristen Stewart, et al) appeared awkward, like a child giving a speech under the coercion of a parent.
Btw, any comedian will profess: Two comics on stage at once KILLS the timing.
I sincerely hope next year they bring the show back to its origin. It’s (ostensibly) about art, filmmaking.
Just because movies like Twilight presently fund Hollywood doesn’t mean us adults need to be reminded of that truth. I mean, it’s not like they show videos of the slaughterhouse in the beef aisle at Ralph’s.
I think one answer is simple —bring Louis J Horvitz back as director. He directed the Academy Awards from 1997-2008. Whether the content was good or bad, he got the money shots!
Actually, I think they should evaluate how well the Oscars does a year later. Clearly people tuned in because everyone was expecting it to be as good if not better than last year’s since last year’s with Hugh Jackman was surprisingly entertaining. Just wait – next year the ratings will be down despite how well it might be put together because this year’s was so bad!
I’m sure Taylor Lautner was just being a purist about genre definition.
Silence of the Lambs is technically a thriller not a horror film.
But hey, when you open the show with a singing gay guy in sequin pants with jazz hands who just loves to DANCE, DANCE, DANCE! – all bets are off. But enough about High Jackman… Neil Patrick Harris was awesome.
It’s amazing to see how their “attempt” at grabbing the younger crowd falied, yet the numbers went up. If they REALLY wanted to grab and retain the younger group, make the show shorter.
Well Silence of the Lambs wasn’t exactly horror either. It was a crime procedural with creepy elements, just like Seven.
Of course, they included it in the montage anyway, but they also included Twilight Saga: New Moon.
Putting young hollywood is nothing new to the Academy awards and nothing to look down on. This is a show for everyone, so why diss them for inviting younger stars.
The musical direction was downright creepy. Playing “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” for Zoe Saldana and Carey Mulligan’s entrance felt all sorts of wrong. And most egregious was playing “I Am Woman” when Kathryn Bigelow was left the stage. How insulting. And what was even stupider was that they continued to play the song while Tom Hanks came out on to the stage.
Only Hollywood could make music cues so sexist and patronizing.
What we’re seeing here is the dying gasp of production expertise for live TV except for sports events. The Oscarcast, unlike other event shows, is the one where the director can’t go back in and do pickups. It’s formatted and has a shot list, so there is no excuse to blow it. When are the producers going to learn that they need to stage the show for the cameras, not for the theatre audience? (Granted, the Kodak Theatre is a nightmare). But jeez: having world-recognizable stars stand on a thrust platform in mid-theatre and not go in for closeups? An iso-cam on hands opening an envelope? Designing a set with stairs nobody can walk down gracefully, a backdrop that looks like venetian blind slats, and what’s with all the lampshades? The show was as spontaneous as a glacier; was everything so tightly scripted that no one dared ad-lib?
Having young actors mixed in with established stars as presenters is useless unless, first, the public knows about it ahead of time so they can tune in and, second, they are given enough to do at the podium. They are the future of the industry and yet all we know about them at Oscar time is that they clean up real good. Their almost complete lack of stage presence, however, is not a good sign. F’r'Chrissake, it’s the Oscars, not a high school play.
The Oscars are about cinematic vision and personal achievement, and it would be nice if the presentation ceremony reflected this and not become an exercise in ass-kissing. If the world’s leading provider of entertainment (Hollywood) can’t create a TV spectacular that people will watch, they should give up and go back to a quiet dinner in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where the winners are known in advance.
And the winner of “worst-director-ever variety-special”? Whomever that guy was. He’ll never work in this (or any other town) again!
That said, I thought Steve and Alex rocked the house! Off-beat, edgy and funny material that they executed flawlessly. For a couple of old guys, they really proved what’s possible with an Oscar show not afraid to take some creative chances. Nice work guys!
Matthew Robillard
That would be Hamish Hamilton, who has also done the MTV VMAs and the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
Thankfully, the 2011 Oscars will once again be directed by an AMERICAN: Don Mischer; he and Bruce Cohen are also producing the show.
Truly the worst directed live show of the past several decades. Was that John Travolta doing a Best Picture into? Or some stage hand in a tux? And the In Memoriam section? Patrick Swayze deserved better than some blurred, distant projection shot on a screen half an auditorium away.
Whoever the director was, he/she should never be allowed inside a control room again.
And one other Razzie: Lose the mawkish tributes of actors standing on stage spewing Hollywood love at grimacing nominees
What a shame! To turn the only great Hollywood shinding left into a dull, lifeless yawn full of faults. It’s the worst direction I’ve ever seen – and this from the film capital of the world in a show honoring the best of the medium itself! Unbelievable! What no one has mentioned are several shots of people in the audience moving towards (or away from) their seats. I can’t remember ever to have seen that on an Oscar telecast – isn’t that just what have been avoided revealing all these years? And now it doesn’t matter anymore? That too helped the whole thing looking like a matter-of-factly boring get-together where a bunch of people are “forced” to sit for too long and whatch something that just is not entertaining enough. Which it just what it was…
This year’s director has really managed to ruin the Oscars and making sure there’ll be a big drop in viewers next year no matter how good it’ll be then.
Bring back Crystal and someone who knows how to write and direct!
Hey – anyone wants to direct the Oscars? It can’t be worse than this!