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    Social media explodes during Oscars but TV viewership doesn’t; Nielsen week in review

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments1185 Views
    Ariana DeBose accepts the award for best performance by an actress in a supporting role for "West Side Story" at the Oscars on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

    By David Bauder, Media Writer

    NEW YORK (AP) --

    Will Smith's violent slap of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards appeared to have a negligible impact on the show's television audience. But the world of social media is a much different story.

    ABC said there were some 22.7 million social media interactions during Sunday's ceremony — the most ever for an Oscars telecast and more than double the 9.5 million recorded from last year's show.

    What do you suppose everyone was tweeting or posting about?

    The network says Oscar videos notched 16 million views on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, also a record for the show. ABC does not have any details about what video clips were most popular, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

    The telecast as a whole drew 16.6 million viewers, up 58% from the 2021 show that was dramatically scaled back due to the pandemic, the Nielsen company said. Yet this year's show was down 30% from the more typical 2020 broadcast, which had been the second-smallest audience.

    Nielsen measures viewership in 15-minute increments, and the 17.3 million viewers during the quarter-hour when Smith's attack took place was virtually identical to the quarter-hour that followed.

    Then the audience dipped to 16.8 million before rising to 17.4 million during the period Smith won his best actor award, Nielsen said.

    Led by its NCAA men's basketball tourney coverage, CBS won the week with an average of 6.2 million in primetime. Despite boasting the Oscars, ABC was second with 5 million. NBC had 2.28 million, Fox had 2.27 million, Univision had 1.5 million, Ion Television had 1.1 million and Telemundo had 960,000.

    TBS, also boosted by the NCAAs, led the cable networks with an average of 2.81 million in prime time. Fox News Channel had 2.47 million, MSNBC had 1.12 million, HGTV had 1.11 million and CNN had 876,000.

    ABC's "World News Tonight" led the evening news ratings race with an average of 8.3 million viewers last week. NBC's "Nightly News" averaged 6.8 million and the "CBS Evening News" had 4.9 million.

    For the week of March 21-27, the 20 most-watched programs in primetime, their networks and viewerships:

    1. "The Academy Awards," ABC, 16.62 million.
    2. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: Arkansas vs. Duke, TBS, 10.34 million
    3. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: St. Peter's vs. Purdue, CBS, 10.18 million.
    4. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: North Carolina vs. UCLA, CBS, 8.82 million.
    5. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: Texas Tech vs. Duke, CBS, 8.23 million.
    6. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: Arkansas vs. Gonzaga, CBS, 8.16 million.
    7. "NCAA Pregame" (Saturday), TBS, 8.04 million.
    8. "FBI," CBS, 8.02 million.
    9. "NCAA Pregame" (Thursday), CBS, 7.93 million.
    10. "Live From the Red Carpet" (7:27 to 8 p.m.), ABC, 7.73 million.
    11. "NCAA Pregame" (Friday), CBS, 7.3 million.
    12. "60 Minutes," CBS, 7.29 million.
    13. NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: Houston vs. Villanova, TBS, 7.1 million.
    14. "NCIS," CBS, 6.65 million.
    15. "FBI: International," CBS, 6.11 million.
    16. "FBI: Most Wanted," CBS, 5.79 million.
    17. "The Neighborhood," CBS, 5.72 million.
    18. "Live From the Red Carpet" (6:58 to 7:27 p.m.), ABC, 5.45 million.
    19. "Bob Hearts Abishola," CBS, 5.39 million.
    20. "Survivor," CBS, 5.35 million.

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    Tags:Academy AwardsChris RockNielsenWill Smith



    Christine Choy, indie filmmaker who led seminal documentary on the killing of Vincent Chin, dies at 73

    Friday, December 12, 2025
    In this photo provided by Film at Lincoln Center, filmmaker Christine Choy attends a screening of her film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" at the 59th New York Film Festival in 2021. (Dan Rodriguez/Film at Lincoln Center via AP)

    Christine Choy, a trailblazer for Asian Americans in independent film and whose documentary on the fatal beating of Vincent Chin was nominated for an Academy Award, has died. She was 73.

    Choy died Sunday, according to a statement from JT Takagi, executive director of Third World Newsreel, a filmmaking collective Choy helped establish in the 1970s. No cause of death was given.

    "She was a prolific filmmaker who made significant films that helped form our Asian American and American film history," Takagi said on the organization's website.

    Chin, a Chinese American who grew up in Detroit, was celebrating his bachelor party in 1982 when two white auto workers attacked him. At that time, Japanese auto companies were being blamed for job losses in the U.S. auto manufacturing industry. The attackers were motivated by their assumption Chin was Japanese. His death and the lack of prison time for the two assailants is considered a galvanizing moment for Asian Americans fighting anti-Asian hate.

    Renee Tajima-Peña, co-director of "Who Killed Vincent Chin?," met Choy around 1980 through Third World Newsreel. They decided to collaborate on a documentary a year after Chin's death after seeing how little coverage it received.

    Tajima-Peña recalls bonding with Choy and other crew during freezing Detroit winter nights while waiting for witnesses in Chin's death and evenings spent with Chin's mother's over home-cooked meals.

    "We were in constant motion during the production with Chris always the picture of cool — sunglasses, stylishly slim, cigarette in hand. And yes she was brash and outspoken — her cigarettes may have had filters but her language didn't," Tajima-Peña said in an email to The Associated Press on Friday. "But, her... Read More

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