Update: Will Smith's slap helped the Oscars become the second-lowest rated ever
Maybe those fan-voted categories really helped convince people to tune in?

It may be the only thing anyone’s talking about today, having generated so many utterly bizarre moments that it all seems like a horrific fever dream (They pre-taped a bunch of categories solely so they could cut out the time it takes for the winner to walk to the stage! BTS showed up for five seconds! Flash entered the Speed Force!), and that’s without even counting literally every aspect of the Will Smith/Chris Rock storyline. Unfortunately for the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences, though, a completely unhinged show where you never know what’s going to happen or what’s happening currently right before your eyes doesn’t translate to good ratings.
Before we get too doom-and-gloom over this, let’s put a positive spin on it: The Oscar ratings are up from last year! The promise of the stupid fan-voted categories and CODA’s awards season run and the perverse curiosity we all shared over how the show would handle the non-televised categories actually translated to slightly more people watching than last year! Hooray! Go ahead and celebrate, Academy. You did it.
But now we must point out that last year’s Oscars was the lowest-rated ceremony ever, so it would’ve taken lightning hitting the Dolby Theater and cutting out the entire broadcast to do any worse than the 2021 show. That one got around 9.8 million viewers, waaay down from the 23.6 million people who tuned in to see 2020’s pre-COVID Oscars, and last night’s show got somewhere around 13.7 million viewers—making it the second-worst ever.