The 2016 Oscars were watched by 34.3 million people, the lowest number of viewers in eight years , as civil rights leaders claimed credit for the decline in the year of diversity boycotts and the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
Early estimates suggested Chris Rock’s turn as host, Spotlight’s win for best picture and Leonardo DiCaprio’s first win in the best actor category for The Revenant all coincided with the official US screencast’s lowest ratings since 2008, when 32 million tuned in to see the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men take best picture. Viewing figures were down 3m from last year’s ceremony, when 37.3 million people watched Birdman pick up the top prize, and 9.4 million from Ellen DeGeneres’ stint as host in 2014, when 12 Years a Slave was the top movie and 43.7 million people tuned in.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who urged viewers to “tune out” of the Oscars in protest against the failure of the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts to nominate a single actor of colour for the second successive year, said he believed the campaign had been at least a partial success.
“For those of us that campaigned around asking citizens to tune out, this is heartening news,” he said in a blog post. “It is a significant decline and should send a clear message to the Academy and to movie studio executives that we will not tolerate discriminatory practices, whether they impact what we see on screen or what takes place behind the lens. Though we don’t take full credit for the decrease in viewership, certainly one would have to assume that we were effective and part of the decline … To those that mocked the idea of a tune out, it seems that the joke was on them.”
Sharpton’s National Action Network had staged simultaneous protests in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Cleveland, Atlanta and Detroit. The advisor to Barack Obama said the group did not want to dictate “who should or who shouldn’t win an Oscar”, but was concerned at the wider problem of “systemic exclusion”, with people of colour often “locked out of the process”.
He continued: “This isn’t just about black actors not being appropriately recognised for their talent; it is about the larger notion of what projects get funding for production, who gets hired behind the scenes, what stories are told and from whose perspective, what roles are available for black and minority actors, how people of colour can secure producer and director positions, how those who actually live in the Los Angeles area can get jobs in the industry and more.”
There was more positive news for the Academy after DiCaprio’s win for best actor became the most popular Oscars-related moment ever on Twitter, eclipsing even the famous DeGeneres selfie from 2014 which featured Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Lupita Nyong’o, Jared Leto and Angelina Jolie in a single star-packed shot.
Thank you to the Academy and the incredible cast & crew of #TheRevenant. #Oscars
— Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) February 29, 2016
Twitter reported that DiCaprio’s victory generated more than 440,000 tweets per minute, ahead of the DeGeneres selfie’s previous best of 255,000 per minute. A snap of Kate Winslet embracing her Titanic co-star after his win proved especially popular, and DiCaprio’s own tweet thanking the Academy and praising the cast and crew of The Revenant was retweeted more than 350,000 times.
