Oscar ratings may already have been steadily sinking over the last four years, but this year they have reached their absolute lowest in almost a decade. The award show has lost almost a quarter of its audience since 2014, according to Nielsen's ratings.
According to Billie Gold, vice president and director of programming research at Amplifi US, the sinking of Oscar ratings might be due to how late the ceremony runs on television and the fact that audiences may have been fearing it would have been politically laden like other awards shows have been recently.
Huge flub does nothing to save the Oscar ratings
Not even the announcement of the wrong movie as the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture managed to bring life into the ceremony.
For almost four minutes, the cast and crew of "La La Land" stood on stage, and the acceptance speeches were going on before the mistake was rectified, and the real winner, Barry Jenkin's movie "Moonlight," was announced.
A very late conclusion
The low ratings might also be partially due to how late the ceremony finished. The show ended at 12:10 a.m. Eastern time, the latest it's gone since 2002; almost twenty minutes after last year's wrapping up at 11:51 p.m.
It being a Sunday night, the fact that some people had work in the morning may have lowered the ratings considerably.
Political leanings influence Oscar ratings?
The cities with the most audience watching the Academy Awards were all in states that supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to Nielsen's data. With the exception of Philadelphia, number six on the top ten cities with the biggest Oscars audience. All the other nine in the list supported Clinton - New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Denver and Washington D.C.
Meanwhile, the four cities with the least interest in the Awards - Memphis, Dayton, Winston-Salem and New Orleans - were all Trump supporters in 2016.
Still the most watched on TV
Despite the historically low ratings, the Oscars were still the single most watched entertainment program of 2017 so far, with 32.9 million watchers and with rates of $2 million for a 30-second commercial.
Gold even commended the unexpected mix-up situation as a surprising moment that people who weren't watching would be sorry they missed it and didn't regard the low Oscar ratings as something that could cause any damage in the long term.
