This year’s Oscars was popular, but did Conan defy gravity? Enough Wicked puns for now. Below, the initial reporting and updated figures for the 2025 Academy Awards ratings.
Gen Z tuned in
March 3, 2025: The awards show viewership did go up by 3% with a 3.92 rating among adults ages 18-49 — the highest rating for this category in two years. They scored an even larger jump with a 3.17 rating for adults ages 18-34, making it their highest rating in that category in five years. It became the most watched awards broadcast this season. But why are millennials and Gen-Z tuning into the Oscars this year? Is it Timothée Chalamet? Or maybe they were excited to see Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande hit the high notes? Maybe Conan O’Brien hosting had something to do with it. While there’s no concrete answer for the ratings jump, it could be possible that Hulu allowing viewers to stream the show made it more accessible to a demographic that typically doesn’t have a cable subscription; even if said stream cut out right before the biggest award of the night.
The most-watched ceremony since 2020
March 4, 2025: Apparently, lots of people really are watching shows like the Oscars on their mobile phones and laptops. Final Nielsen numbers for Sunday’s ceremony came in Tuesday morning, and it turns out the event was actually seen by a very nice 19.69 million viewers, substantially more than the 18.1 million Nielsen’s fast national data showed on Monday before the ratings giant had accounted for viewing that doesn’t happen on TV sets. Even more important, the final numbers show that rather than a (small) decline, Conan O’Brien’s first Oscarcast registered a (small) increase over the show’s 2024 average of 19.49 million, making it the most-watched Academy Awards since the pre-pandemic 2020 ceremony. The gains were even larger among younger viewers with the show notching a 4.54 rating among adults under 50 (up 19 percent from last year) and a 3.9 with adults under 34 (up 28 percent). Somewhere, John Lithgow is looking slightly … happy.