2020 Academy Awards TV seeing figures sink to an all-time low

The broadcast of the 2020 Academy Awards arrived at its smallest-ever US crowd of 23.6 million watchers.

Nielsen ratings revealed that the crowd for the Sunday broadcast was down 20% from a year back. Already, the lowest number of watchers of the Oscars was 26.5 million in 2018.

The Academy Awards honored Parasite as the best picture. While it made history as the first non-English-language film to win the top award, it was not a crowd of people grabber for the broadcast. The Oscars were held sooner in the year than expected, and that may have kept the show from building buzz.

For the second consecutive year, the show had no host. It opened for the current year with an animating production number from Janelle Monáe and a fresh comic set featuring Steve Martin and Chris Rock.

In 2019, that innovation appeared to trigger a spike in review figures, however, pundits thought the absence of host was a handicap this year. Dominic Patten of Deadline said the show “bellowed out for a ringmaster to harness what soon became a lackluster circus”.

For a great part of the 2000s, the Oscars floated somewhere in the range of 35 and 45 million watchers, and it was often the US’s second most-watched TV program of the year after the Super Bowl. (The current year’s broadcast of the Super Bowl was the lowest in 10 years.) As recently as 2015, the Oscars had 37.3 million watchers. Be that as it may, live TV seeing when all is said in done has dropped fundamentally over the past few years with the explosion in streaming services.

Viewership for the Golden Globes (18.3 million) and Grammys (18.7 million) was likewise down from 2019, yet the drop was not as steep.