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Saturday, July 12, 2025

Audience for 95th Oscars rebounds slightly to 18.7 million

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851 days ago
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Host Jimmy Kimmel speaks at the Oscars on Sunday, March 12, 2023, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Host Jimmy Kimmel speaks at the Oscars on Sunday, March 12, 2023, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Whether it was the lin­ger­ing dra­ma of The Slap or the promi­nence of block­busters in the best pic­ture race, a big­ger au­di­ence was lured back to the Os­cars this year.

The 95th Acad­e­my Awards, which aired Sun­day night on ABC, was viewed by an es­ti­mat­ed 18.7 mil­lion, ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nary Fast Na­tion­al Live+Same Day num­bers re­leased Mon­day by ABC. That’s up 12% from last year’s show, but still low com­pared to most years.

The evening’s main coun­ter­pro­gram­ming, the sea­son fi­nale of “The Last of Us” pulled in 8.2 mil­lion view­ers across HBO and HBO Max. The show be­gan at 9 p.m. EDT, an hour af­ter the Os­cars start­ed.

A fre­quent crit­i­cism of the Os­cars is that the show cel­e­brates films that don’t have wide ap­peal. This year was marked­ly dif­fer­ent, how­ev­er, with two bil­lion-dol­lar block­buster se­quels in the mix: “Top: Gun Mav­er­ick” and “Avatar: The Way of Wa­ter” were both nom­i­nat­ed for best pic­ture. An­gela Bas­sett was nom­i­nat­ed for a Mar­vel movie, a first. Even the win­ning film, A24’s “Every­thing Every­where All At Once,” made over $100 mil­lion at the glob­al box of­fice and played in the­aters for months.

For many years, the Os­cars were of­ten the sec­ond most-watched tele­vi­sion pro­gram of the year be­hind the Su­per Bowl. Un­til 2018, the Os­car tele­cast had nev­er slipped be­low 30 mil­lion view­ers, ac­cord­ing to Nielsen records. The high-wa­ter mark was the 55 mil­lion peo­ple who watched “Ti­tan­ic” clean up in 1998.

From the 43.7 mil­lion who watched in 2014, view­er­ship de­clined steadi­ly to 26.5 mil­lion in 2018, then went back up to 29.6 mil­lion in 2019, and 23.6 mil­lion in 2020. The bot­tom fell out with the pan­dem­ic-di­min­ished show in 2021, seen by 9.85 mil­lion. It re­bound­ed last year to 16.6 mil­lion, which was the sec­ond low­est-rat­ed show ever.

Jim­my Kim­mel, who presided over the cer­e­mo­ny in 2017 and 2018, re­turned to host the show, para­chut­ing on to the Dol­by The­atre stage. The show al­so fea­tured per­for­mances from pop stars like Ri­han­na and La­dy Gaga.

Broad­cast tele­vi­sion view­er­ship has gone down across the board in the stream­ing era, and awards shows have il­lus­trat­ed that. The show boast­ed 27.4 mil­lion to­tal so­cial in­ter­ac­tions across In­sta­gram, Twit­ter, Face­book and YouTube and was the No. 1 world­wide trend­ing top­ic on Twit­ter for its du­ra­tion.

By Mon­day af­ter­noon, Ke Huy Quan’s ac­cep­tance speech had over 1.3 mil­lion views on YouTube, and Bren­dan Fras­er’s was up to 2.6 mil­lion.

The ABC broad­cast al­so had 1.8 mil­lion views of the Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage live stream.

“What we want­ed to do was go out and ex­e­cute a show that peo­ple would re­al­ly like and a show peo­ple would talk about,” Os­cars pro­duc­er Glenn Weiss told The Hol­ly­wood Re­porter in the hours af­ter the show. “We think we did ac­com­plish that. I sure hope that (Mon­day) de­liv­ers good news in the rat­ings front, but ei­ther way, I think it was a suc­cess­ful evening.”

By LIND­SEY BAHR

LOS AN­GE­LES (AP)

OscarsInstagram


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