Oscars ratings dip again

The 32.9 million viewers tuning into Sunday’s Academy Awards represented a drop-off of more than a million from last year and the Oscars’ smallest audience since 2008.

The Nielsen company reported that viewership dipped notably from the 34.3 million who watched the ABC telecast in 2016, giving Hollywood’s biggest night its smallest audience since 32 million watched in ’08.

The ceremony, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, maintained a political edge as many winners, presenters and Kimmel himself took repeated digs at President Donald Trump.

An anti-Trump sentiment was hardly unexpected after the politically charged atmo- sphere of the Golden Globes, which aired in early January with a number of celebrities, particularly Meryl Streep, taking Trump to task. After that, some Trump supporters called for a viewer boycott of the Oscars telecast, which may have partly accounted for the audience’s falloff from last year.

But a dwindling audience has been an Oscars trend for three years in a row. In 2013 and 2014, the awards show reached more than 40 million viewers, a figure that dipped to 37.3 million in 2015.

Not that Sunday’s show didn’t pack a big surprise. But it came at the end, when presenter Faye Dunaway mistakenly declared “La La Land” the best picture winner before the record was corrected to “Moonlight.”