Ratings For ‘Wokest Oscars Ever’ Tumble To All-Time Low As Exhausted Americans Tune Out

Ricky Gervais might have been on to something…

America!
Binge-watch #AfterLife on @Netflix tonight. It’s about a man who realises that humanity is a disgusting, narcissistic plague, and so becomes angry & depressed and loses the will to live. Or watch The Oscars instead and actually experience those feelings first hand. pic.twitter.com/3mUo4bOpte

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) February 9, 2020

From Joaquin Phoenix – the man who’s fighting climate change by wearing the same tux to all his award shows – raving about the injustices of inseminating cows, to Chris Rock and Steve Martin’s insipid jokes about #OscarsSoWhite, this year’s Oscars was almost intolerable for viewers who haven’t totally bought in to the far-left identity politics currently dominating Hollywood. And it showed in the ratings.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, this year’s Oscars – which some have joked would be the ‘wokest Oscars ever’ after Kevin Hart was fired as host and best picture went to a foreign film (South Korea’s "Parasite") for the first time – bagged the lowest TV ratings in the history of the storied awards show.

First, the Phoenix clip (which also included a dig on cancel culture before the actor accused all of humanity of harboring an "egocentric worldview."

Joaquin Phoenix recalled his late brother, River Phoenix, and spoke out about human beings exploiting other species “with impunity” in an emotional speech after he won the lead actor Oscar. #Oscars

You can read the entire speech here:https://t.co/7m87duvBY0 pic.twitter.com/0OWTwIxNs8

— LAT Entertainment (@latimesent) February 10, 2020

And here’s Rock and Martin (two legendary comedians who are usually hilarious in any other context):

#Oscars Moment: The presenter duo we never knew we needed. @SteveMartinToGo and @chrisrock pic.twitter.com/9rF349pCwA

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 10, 2020

Of course, this year’s Oscars was also the first to proceed without a host, since the show fired black comedian Kevin Hart over some ancient vaguely homophobic (by today’s standards) tweets that basically epitomized cancel culture (famous people and comedians being forced to answer for insensitive jokes years or even decades later).

 

Then again, this isn’t a new trend, as American viewership of award shows has been declining for years (last year’s show ended a four year streak of shrinking viewership). That’s likely for a mix of reasons, including the fact that everybody can just wait until the next day to watch the highlights. Also: Nobody really cares about film anymore in the age of endlessly streaming prestige television.

The viewership for this year’s show was only 23.6 million people, down roughly 6 million from the 29 million+ who watched it last year, according to the Hollywood Reporter (these metrics differ slightly from the data used in the chart above, though the trend is arguably the same). 

Another reason why Americans have grown tired of the Oscars: Nobody enjoys listening to a bunch of limousine liberals who dropped out of high school lecture America about it’s moral shortcomings, when Hollywood is one of the biggest purveyors of depravity in the country, as we learned with the Harvey Weinstein scandal. 

A poll carried out on Twitter by a writer for the Daily Caller found that more than 90% of respondents would prefer to watch XFL football over the Oscars.

Would you rather watch the Oscars or the XFL?

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) February 9, 2020

The Oscars isn’t the only award show seeing a massive drop in ratings: the Emmys also suffered a steep ratings decline. The September 2019 Emmy broadcast on Fox fell by 32% in viewers and 29% in adults between the ages of 18 and 49 from the previous year.