Variety reports the Nielsen ratings for last night’s Oscar awards broadcast.
Per Nielsen Live+Same Day preliminary national numbers, an average of 9.85 million viewers tuned in on Sunday evening to watch a more intimate and stripped-down version of the Oscars in the midst of a pandemic. That’s a 58.3%, 13.75 million viewer drop-off from last year. The Academy’s third host-less show in a row scored a 1.9 rating among adults 18-49 in the fast national ratings, a 64.2% dip from 2020.
Last year was a record low in terms of viewers, this year is substantially worse. You could blame the Covid-19-shuttered movie houses across the country, that certainly played a part in this year’s non-viewership.
The downward trend could also be related to Hollywood calling the conservative half of Americans terrible people. You saying we’re “terrible” rarely turns us into consumers of your product.
We’ve more-or-less known Hollywood thinks we’re terrible since Sen. McCarthy. But for decades you kept those views to yourself so we could ignore them.
Now, as Hollywood openly flies its freak flag, we find it hard to justify buying your product when it feels ‘treasonous.’ That is one downside of having made everything political.
