Oscars so Low: Why Have the Ratings Slipped this Far?

It turns out that the results of this year’s academy awards weren’t the only thing that underwhelmed.  Ratings for the hit an all-time low, slumping almost 20 per cent on last year’s total. Sunday’s ceremony drew in 26.5 million viewers compared to figures of 43.7 million from just four years ago, a trend the Academy can surely not sustain for much longer.

Fears of declining viewership have been on the minds of the show's producers for some time. After last year's disappointing turnout, a few adjustments were made.

But changing the start time of the ceremony from 8.30 to 8 obviously didn’t help, and senior ABC executives saying that the ceremony was aimed at being more “planned than spur of themoment” have proven equally useless.

That these figures are worse than the previous low of 2008, when the organisation of the show was hindered by the Writers Guild of America strike is a worrying. Even the old adage that the movies draw the viewers has also refused to hold firm this year: The Shape of Water is the highest grossing film to win best picture since Argo in 2013.

So, what went wrong? The floating theories are as political as they are analytical. Whilst I’m sure the producers are forensically studying Piers Morgan’s 10-point plan to save the Oscars (Point 3: “For the love of God, can you all shut up about Meryl Streep”), there will also be some genuine head scratching going on in academy towers: How does it regain this lost ground? 

Live TV running out of life?

Of the media narratives about what happened and where to next after this years disappointment, one of the main defences to emerge from the post mortem  is that ratings for live shows and live awards shows in particular have nosedived over the last year.

This is the reason that most producers will want to believe, simply because it allows them to deflect blame from themselves onto a broader television trend.

The Screen Actors Guild dropped by 30 per cent, the Grammy’s fell by a quarter and even the Super Bowl saw a 7 per cent tail off- a seven year low. More viewers are choosing to watch content differently, a fixture of contemporary viewing habits that aren’t accurately captured by TV ratings. 

Social media and streaming in particular account for a vast proportion of views as people skip the shows themselves to jump to the highlights the morning after: Nielsen ratings don’t paint the full picture of engagement as much as they used to because people don’t consume content the way they used to.

“The top scripted network series gets a mere fraction of what the number-one show got 10 or 15 years ago. It's a niche world,” says Vulture writer Mark Harris.” Things, as Tony Soprano once said, are trending downward.”

 The public has always lamented how the show is too long, boring and contains movies that are unpalatable to a broader audience. It’s definitely not the first time that people have called the ceremony “too political”, either.

This reasoning is a little too convenient, however.

Yes, we’ve changed our viewing habits and sure, many of the complaints levelled against the awards are not new, but a 20 per cent decline from last year still leaves a sizeable explanatory gap. The precedence of streaming and social media has been the case for at least five years. 

Even if 45 per cent of us watch over an hour of video online every day, the academy didn’t just get its own YouTube channel. Yes, this sort of viewership is indeed declining, but why has the Oscar’s been the first to sink to its all-time low?

Setting the world a-trite

The presence of politics at the Oscars was best summed up by Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who said he was “sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda”  at the ceremony back in 1973.

Whilst Chayefsky might in his own way been making a political statement against political statements, his sentiment has continued to hold firm among much of the broader public.

Liberal Hollywood taking aim at conservative America is part and parcel of the awards, but in the era of Trump the aim has intensified. That’s not to mention the demons plaguing Hollywood itself that the awards were bound to confront.

It would still be difficult to argue that the public attention has worn thin because of this renewed focus. It didn’t happen with climate change; neither did it happen with Oscar’s so white.

Trump was only mentioned four times during the entire show, and the only “highlight” political moment to make the mainstream narrative came from Frances McDormand’s rousing acceptance speech when collecting her Best Actress award.

The press has, as it always does, stuck to party lines. Nothing really changed.  The real problem might just have been that the show itself was just really boring.

The difficulty of picking a highlight from the show outside of the McDormand speech (and the Maya Rudolph/ Tiffany Haddish skit) highlights the problem with this year’s Oscars. Every safe bet paid off, nothing really felt fresh- even in this year’s exceptionally strong pool there wasn’t a genuine surprise.

When things become predictable, they at least need to be memorable.

I won’t rant about the show itself- that can be left to the twitterati and internet. The ceremony was best summed by Washington Post TVcritic Hank Stuever: “In his second year, Kimmel has shown that the telecast needn’t be anything but sharp and sure, with a funny host whose bits are manageable, shareable and — best of all — forgotten,” Stuever writes.

” We’re not making showbiz history here; we’re just trying to get through another Oscar night.”