THE 2023 Oscars ceremony proceeded without any hiccups, following a surprisingly eventful ceremony last year.
Everything Everywhere All at Once took home a total of seven awards, including Best Picture and three of the four acting categories, making it the most-awarded film at the Oscars in the last decade.
According to an ABC press release citing preliminary Nielsen figures, the 95th Academy Awards telecast, presented by Jimmy Kimmel, drew an average viewership of 18.7 million total viewers and a 4.0 rating among adults 18 to 49.
This is a 12% increase in total viewers over the previous year's tally of 16.7 million.
The Oscars telecast outperformed the Grammys on CBS (12.5 million viewers) in February and the Emmys on NBC (5.9 million viewers) in September.
The Golden Globes, which returned to NBC after a year away, drew 6.3 million viewers in January.
Kimmel's return as host of the Oscars may have had a positive impact on the show's ratings. Kimmel had previously hosted in 2017, which brought in 33 million people, and in 2018, the year of the envelope snafu that mistakenly awarded La La Land the Best Picture trophy instead of Moonlight.
The show was up against the season one conclusion of HBO's smash-hit series The Last of Us, which, according to Variety, set a new series high in terms of ratings: drawing an estimated 8.2 million viewers.
While this year's numbers are a three-year rise, they remain among the lowest in Academy Awards history. According to Variety, the most number of people tuned in (over 55 million) for the 1998 event, when James Cameron's epic Titanic won Best Picture.
The last time the show attracted more than 20 million viewers was in 2020, when Parasite won Best Picture, with 23.6 million tuning in.
According to Deadline, the lowest ratings were in 2021, when there was no host and resulted in a dismal 10.4 million viewers. – The Vibes, March 14, 2023
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