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By Thomas Buckley
The Academy Awards broadcast Sunday night drew its largest TV audience since 2020, boosted by the popular films like Oppenheimer and Barbie, as well as a one hour earlier start.
The show, carried on Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network, attracted an audience of 19.5 million viewers, the network said Monday, a 4.3 per cent increase from last year’s ceremony.
The event was a coronation two decades in the making for director Christopher Nolan, whose critically acclaimed Memento and Dunkirk were nominated for Oscars but never brought home top prizes. Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a movie about the father of the atomic bomb, won best picture, best director and best actor on its way to seven awards in all.
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Oscar viewership has withered in recent years due to cord cutting and a focus at the ceremony on small, art-house films. Last year’s show, in which Everything Everywhere All at Once won best picture and six other trophies, drew 18.7 million viewers.
This year’s show broke with that pattern. Together Oppenheimer, from Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros.’ Barbie, another best-picture nominee, collected almost $1 billion in domestic ticket sales, helping to ensure a larger audience for last night’s ceremony. Oscar viewership peaked in 1998, when 55.2 million saw Titanic become the big winner.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which runs the awards, has tried to find ways to boost viewers, such as increasing the number of films nominated for best picture to 10 from five, so that more-popular movies could be contenders.
This year, ABC began the show an hour earlier, at 4 p.m. in Los Angeles.
The nonprofit group generated $143.5 million in revenue last year from Oscar-related activities, the vast majority of its total.
