LOS ANGELES — “Babenheimer'' caused an uptick, not a boom, in Oscar ratings.
An estimated 19.5 million people watched Sunday night's 96th Academy Awards ceremony on ABC. This was the highest number for television broadcasting in the last four years.
But the upward trend comes from an all-time low during the pandemic, and was only a 4% increase from last year's estimated audience of 18.7 million viewers, according to figures released by ABC on Monday.
The Academy experimented with starting this year's show an hour early, and for the first time in years, blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” that viewers actually saw were nominated in large numbers.
Ratings peaked in the final half-hour, when Ryan Gosling performed “I'm Just Ken” from “Barbie,” and Oppenheimer won Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture.
For many years, the Oscars were often the second most-watched television show of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. Until 2018, the Oscars telecast never drew fewer than 30 million viewers, according to Nielsen records. The highest level was 55 million people who watched the cleaning of “Titanic” in 1998.
The number of viewers in 2014 was 43.7 million, which steadily decreased to 26.5 million in 2018, 29.6 million in 2019, and back to 23.6 million in 2020. The bottom fell out in 2021, when the pandemic diminished, and the number was 9.85. a million. In 2022, the year of the slap, he started to recover with 16.6 million cases.