Oscars viewership continues to plummet

Just under 18 million people tuned in to watch the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday. That’s a drop from last year’s almost 20 million viewers. To put the latest numbers in perspective, more than 125 million fans watched the Super Bowl in February.

The Oscars isn’t the only awards show to suffer from a dwindling fanbase. The Grammy Awards and the Golden Globes have also reported drops in viewership this year.

To boost engagement, the Academy hopes to make the Oscars ceremony more accessible by partnering with influencers and bringing the show exclusively online. But audiences may still hesitate to tune in, since many viewers are increasingly unfamiliar with the movies being nominated and the actors they feature. Plus, many audiences dislike the politics of the event.

In 1998, around 55 million people tuned into the Oscars to watch Titanic win 11 Academy Awards, including best picture. The box office smash hit remains one of the highest-grossing films in history. Its popularity with audiences kept it in the No. 1 spot for 15 weeks.

But for the past few years, the Academy has tapped more obscure films for awards rather than fan favorites, with 2023’s Oppenheimer being a bit of an anomaly. According to a YouGov survey conducted before this year’s ceremony, about 57% of Americans believe Oscar-recognized films increasingly appeal more to critics than to viewers, even though filmmaking professionals, not critics, make up the Academy.

David Tarleton, the chair of the Film and Media Arts Department at Syracuse University, says that’s hardly a new phenomenon. “There is traditionally a kind of disconnect between popularity of films with audiences and the kind of films that win,” Tarleton said.

Alex Chung, director of the School of Cinema, Art and Design at George Fox University, says that general disconnect may contribute to waning interest in the event. “I think part of the reason why the Oscars have lost cultural currency is that they celebrate movies that nobody sees,” he said. Chung gave the example of Moonlight beating La La Land for best picture in 2017, the former grossing just $66 million worldwide compared to La La Land’s $522 million.

Historically, blockbuster hits like Saving Private Ryan and The Gladiator swept the Academy Awards. And some of this year’s winners were widely viewed. Reviews for the best picture winner One Battle After Another were mixed with some critics hailing it as “spectacular” and others calling it “totally meh.” But the movie grossed more than $200 million worldwide last year. Sinners raked in nearly $370 million globally. “It would have been shocking if a movie like Train Dreams won,” Chung said. “That would just be a continuation of a recent trend of awarding smaller films.” But Sinners particularly, “was a movie people actually watched.”

Still, because there’s so much content available for consumption, few movies capture worldwide attention the way Titanic did. “They are celebrating theatrically released feature films,” Tarleton said. “Limited series on streaming often have a lot more cultural weight than features do.”

Then there’s the politics of the Oscars. Although celebrities weren’t especially vocal about politics at the recent ceremony, several made snide remarks aimed at Republicans, including a jab at CBS from Jimmy Kimmel. And best picture winner One Battle After Another was chock full of political messaging about immigration and revolting against a fascist government. “Hollywood is very much caught in the cultural wars,” Tarleton said. “There may be a kind of indifference to what’s happening with the Oscars from certain parts of the right.”

Another reason for declining interest in the Oscars spans the partisan divide: Historically, the show has only been broadcast on ABC. Today, only 36% of Americans subscribe to cable or satellite TV. This year the show streamed live on Hulu for the first time.

Originally, viewers had to watch the event via live broadcast, but now many people can view clips of the Oscars afterwards, argues James Kendrick, a professor of film at Baylor University. “It’s harder and harder, in our attention-addled era, for people to commit to sitting down for three hours and watching an award ceremony,” he said. Overall, he imagines viewership might be more spread out rather than truly dropping. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the Oscars being less important to people,” he said. “I think it’s just reflective of the way we consume media.”

The Academy has aimed at making the ceremony even more immediately accessible by announcing in December that the Oscars will broadcast exclusively on YouTube beginning in 2029. “We will be able to celebrate cinema, inspire new generations of filmmakers and provide access to our film history on an unprecedented global scale,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in a statement.

It’s not the Academy’s first attempt at attracting younger viewers. YouTube star Amelia Dimoldenberg has served as the Oscars’ social media ambassador and red carpet reporter for three years in a row. Host Conan O’Brien joked about reaching younger viewers using Gen Alpha slang: “When you’re hostmaxxing the Oscars and lowkenuinely trying to rizz up the younger demographic by going brain-rot mode…Well, that’s a message that the young people will definitely see watching broadcast television.”

But efforts to generate renewed interest in the Oscars might not pay off, even with the move to YouTube.

For one thing, seeing a movie star on the red carpet isn’t an automatic draw any more. Now that Hollywood celebrities have worked on streaming projects and have significant social media presences, they’ve become a lot more available. “So the idea of an exclusive, hard to know movie star is pretty rare these days,” Chung said.

Plus, young viewers are often more captivated by social media celebrities than movie stars. “Your average 50 year old has no idea who Mr. Beast is, for example, and yet your average 14 year old certainly does,” David Tarleton said. “And vice versa. Your average 18 year old probably doesn’t engage with media in the same way that older people do.”

In the future, Tarleton believes shifting to YouTube will work in the Academy’s favor. The platform appeals more to young viewers, and it allows the ceremony to reach more of an international audience.

Ultimately, he hopes that the ceremony will continue to bring in new viewers. “The Oscars has been, for the last nearly one hundred years, the pinnacle of the film community,” Tarleton said. “It has been considered the most prestigious entertainment industry award.”

That prestige element, according to Alex Chung, gives studios and filmmakers an incentive to make quality films. Without an industry-wide bar to rise above, some of Hollywood’s more original films might not get made. “You either [make movies] for the money or for the prestige,” Chung said. “If you love movies, you should root for these shows to do well.”