Why the 2025 Oscars Are Still Worth Watching
It’s still the most popular party on TV. Almost 20 million viewers tuned in to last year’s Academy Awards to see who would take home the Oscar for, among other categories, Best Picture. (Oppenheimer won.) The ceremony was the 13th most watched telecast in all of 2024, and the top entertainment show.
Only football and a once-every-four-years presidential debate beat out last March’s ceremony. The Oscars bested the Grammys, beat the World Series, and even vaulted over the Olympics. As TV watching continues to get more fragmented, we can still count on the Academy Awards to bring us together around the watercooler to chat movies.
The Best Picture nominee pool has been set at 10 films since the 2022 broadcast, a varied group of movies to please a lot of tastes. This year, there are blockbusters like the sci-fi sequel Dune: Part 2 and The Wizard of Oz prequel fantasy Wicked, middle-brow faves like the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and the papal election thriller (yes, thriller!) Conclave, plus smaller art-house fare like the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel adaptation Nickel Boys, and Hungarian architect-émigré drama The Brutalist (whose running time is anything but small: over three-and-a-half hours).
The hosts might be just as important as the movies to get us excited about tuning in. It’s no surprise that the wildly popular actor and comedian Bob Hope was invited to emcee 19 times, and he still holds the record today for multiple ceremonies. Billy Crystal comes in second, at nine times, starting in 1990 (Driving Miss Daisy won) and last hosting in 2012 (The Artist). The King of Late Night, Johnny Carson, hosted five times, and Whoopi Goldberg has four hosting gigs under her belt, first in 1994 (Schindler’s List) and last in 2002 (A Beautiful Mind).
It’s no coincidence that these hosts are all comedians who can keep a three-hour-plus ceremony entertaining and moving along smoothly. This year, former late-night host and podcaster Conan O’Brien is taking the reins for the first time.
Last year’s big viewership numbers continued a three-year upward trend in ratings (after a low of 10.4 million viewers during the COVID-restricted show in 2021), so O’Brien has some pressure to make it a great show while at the same time recognizing the devastating Los Angles fires and their impact on theHollywood community. But that’s what the laughs are for!
The Oscars, Sunday, March 2, 7/6c, ABC & Hulu
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