What's that smell?

Shockingly unshocking

chart showing Oscars' ratings from 2001 to 2022
Oscars' viewership (millions) for the period 2001–2022: The pandemic seems to have been just a blip in the overall downward trend (dashed line), from 2014 though to 2020.

Oh poop! Despite the powerhouse trio of hosts, Oscars 2022 continues the downward trend in viewership. Preliminary figures indicate 15.4M viewers, compared to 23.6M in 2020. This is still up from last year's 10.4M though, so the Academy and ABC must be feeling encouraged.

Which leaves the Academy in a quandary. Following Will Smith's bitch-slapping of Chris Rock onstage, what shock tactics can they deploy next year to counteract viewers' apathy?

Amateur hour...plus two-and-a-half

Nicholas Barber's review, on behalf of the BBC, was withering towards the production as a whole, culminating with this final thought:

At the start, Schumer made a joke about the decline and fall of the Golden Globes: once an important, high-profile awards ceremony, now so mired in scandal that it was held in private this year. Three and a half hours later, the Academy Awards couldn't afford to be so smug. If this farrago was the best the producers could come up with, then maybe next year's Oscars should be held in private, too.

Nicholas Barber, Oscars 2022: Will Smith's slap aside, it was a shambles, BBC Culture

Ouch!

Fake views

Jacob King (@JacobOracle)
A picture paints a thousand words, but not necessarily the truth: Oscars 2022 viewership leaps from 9.6M to 17.4M after Will Smith humiliates himself in public.

Some social media commentators have latched onto a graphic tweeted by a financial analyst, Jacob King (@JacobOracle), showing the point at which viewership spiked after the altercation. They've fallen into the trap, or failed to understand the joke, depending on which way you look at it.

Judging by the rapid fluctations, for what is ostensibly a 3½-hour show, I don't think it is what it says it is. Viewership figures simply don't have that much time granularity. I'm going to hazard a guess that this is a stock market graph, real or imaginary, annotated for shitz 'n' gigglz.

Nevertheless, it's a good joke. Props! (thumbup)

The final viewing figures are now available: Oscars 2022 drew 16.6M viewers, a mere 30% drop from the pre-pandemic figure. Of course, the spin machine's been heralding the 60% increase over last year, but that's a bogus comparison since 2021 was an anomaly.

The trend, above, predicted that the broadcast would reach 17.6M viewers. So it seems that the general decline is getting back on track after last year's derailment! (thumbup)

The model predicts 14.7M viewers next year. We shall see…(wink)