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Originally Posted by Michael Reuben
Aside from the general downward trend in viewership, the writers' strike really messed them up. Not knowing until pretty late in the game what kind of show they were going to have, they did a lot less promotion. I think many people didn't even know when the Oscars were on this year.
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I think your point about the writers strike and the lack of promotion is the main reason why the Oscar telecast ratings were down as far as they were this year. A look at the actual numbers indicates that something unusual must have been behind the dramatic decline in the ratings this year.
The best cumulative list I've found for comparing ratings by year was in this blog post, from the day of the telecast (so the post didn't include this year's telecast):
Gold Derby Awards News by Tom O'Neil - The Envelope - LA Times
It lists a total number of viewers (I think it's an estimate of the average number of viewers throughout the telecast) for each Oscars show going back to '87. Notice that the large majority of the shows in the last 20 years have had between 40 and 46 million viewers.
The exceptions were, on the high end, the Forrest Gump year (48 mil) and the Titanic year (55 mil). So big popular winners can increase the ratings, as we all know. The exceptions to the 40-46 million range on the low end were: the Chicago year (33 million), the Crash/Brokeback year (39 million), and, now, this year's telecast, which has been reported as having averaged 32 million viewers.
So the two DRAMATICALLY lower rated years were (a) the Chicago year, and (b) this year. Both those years had significantly lower numbers than any other year. The Chicago year was most likely down because the ceremony happened right when the Iraq war started (less than a week into the war). There had to have been SOMETHING unusual going on for the ratings to be that low, so the war is the most likely explanation--why else would the total viewership have gone back UP by 10 million over the next two years?
But what about all the obscure nominees this year? Well, the same could certainly be said of the year that The English Patient won, and neither Million Dollar Baby nor The Aviator were huge hits either (leading to plenty of complaints during the M$B year about "why won't Hollywood nominate popular movies"), but the total viewer numbers were still pretty stable for those years, in the low-to-mid 40 million range. Ratings were down a bit from that level when it was Crash vs. Brokeback (a total of 39 million viewers), but not nearly as down as this year. So it can't be ENTIRELY because of the nominees--there's gotta be something else unusual at play.
The writers strike explanation is pretty clearly the likeliest one. It meant that fewer people had been watching TV leading up to the Oscars telecast, which resulted in decreased promotion on the network. Sure, plenty of people still watched the Oscars, over 30 million, but isn't there a decent-sized chunk of the potential audience (maybe 5 or 6 million) that would say, "Oh, yeah, the Oscars are on, let's watch that," but only so long as they're successfully reminded of it? That must be why the ratings went down as much as they did this year.