Short Lived Joy in Oscarland

This morning Drudge had the sirens going on his website with the news that the overnight Oscar ratings were the best in five years. Those numbers were a little bit hard to reconcile when you looked at the lukewarm to bad reviews that host Chris Rock got from many of the critics.

Well hold on there a minute. There is much less joy in Tinseltown this afternoon because the actual viewership for last night's awards were down 6%, or over 2,000,000 viewers from last year. It seems that while ratings may have been up in the 56 largest markets, the folks in flyover country tuned out. Rock may have attracted some younger folks in the big cities, but the folks down on the farm said "no thanks".

The other big problem for this year's show was the relatively poor box office results of the five Best Picture nominees. Had The Passion of the Christ been nominated, I'm sure viewership would have been way up, but since most of the Academy voters didn't bother to go see it, it didn't get a much-deserved nomination.

I'm sure the Bush bashing during the opening monologue also caused some TV sets to seek out other programs as Red Staters headed elsewhere.