Chart of the Day: Why Didn't People Watch the Oscars?

How bad were the Oscar ratings? Pretty bad.

On the suggestion of our resident Market Mover, here is a scatterplot showing the number of people who watched the Oscars and the not-inflation-adjusted box office receipts for the best picture nominees for each year since the 1983 telecast.

(For the stat geeks, the R-squared is .52, so it looks like this relationship explains about half of the variability in the Oscar ratings/box office relationship)

Understandably, there's a pretty clear relationship between how well the best picture nominees do and the number of people who watched the Oscars. In 1998, mega-blockbuster and best picture nominee Titanic helped drive ratings and in 1983 it was E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The start of the current Iraq war in 2003 probably cost the telecast -- which featured best picture nominee The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers -- about 10 million viewers, or close to 25 percent.

This year, it looks like there was an abnormal loss in viewership of about 6 or 7 million. Why did that happen? Reuters attributes it to the lack of blockbusters in the best picture category as well as fewer big stars.

It's hard to buy the first reason, largely because the 2006 telecast also didn't feature a high grossing film but managed to bring in 39 million viewers. (The highest grossing best picture nominee in 2006 was Brokeback Mountain with $83 million compared with Juno this year at $130 million.)

But the stars theory might have some validity. Using 2006 as an example again, that year's best picture nominees included Babel and The Departed which were linked to Brad Pitt, Martin Scorsese and Mark Wahlberg. The only big name actor this year was George Clooney who starred in the Michael Clayton.

(One note about the chart, I'm not sure if the receipts are inflation-adjusted, I'll update when Box Office Mojo gets back to me.)