Early ratings results for Sunday night’s broadcast of the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony on ABC pointed toward an overall audience of 37.6 million, about 4 million viewers short of last year’s 41.7 million.
In a year when ratings for the Grammys, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl were all up, the bright, new Twitter-fingered Oscars were down. Tom Sherak, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the awards and produces the telecast, was not ready to concede defeat, however. “I think it’s a beginning — everything needs to start somewhere,” Mr. Sherak said in a telephone interview. “Something didn’t work? Let’s try to fix it.”
The viewership figures mean that these annual movie awards are still chugging along as a spectacle one-third the size of the Super Bowl, almost as big as a good playoff game and down about 34 percent from their own contemporary ratings peak, in 1998, when “Titanic” helped deliver more than 57 million viewers.
But Mr. Franco and Ms. Hathaway survived. And for the Oscars, there’s always next year.