Sunday night offered the Academy Awards, and the TV ratings show yet another drop in viewership, to something like 18 million. Keep in mind that the Academy Awards used to draw near Super Bowl numbers 50 years ago, back when the show featured films that Americans had heard of and even gone to see. Nowadays the odds of winning the Best Picture Award seem to be inversely correlated with how few people have even heard of a film.
Contrast this with Trump’s State of the Union speech last night, whose audience numbers are surely a multiple of the Academy Awards (I can’t find any quick estimates for total audience size), which may be understandable since Trump’s supporting cast (House Dems) aren’t very appealing to look at. The CBS/YouGov poll shows it was more popular than Hollywood movies, too:
