Lady Gaga arrives for the 91st annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, on 24 February 2019. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Etienne Laurent) 
The audience for Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast -- a shorter ceremony with no host -- improved 12 percent from a year ago. Walt Disney Co.’s ABC said that 29.6 million people watched the Oscars, up from 26.5 million a year ago.
The show was marked by a brisker pace and a diverse group of winners, including the first competitive Oscar for director Spike Lee. It ran slightly over three hours. Last year’s telecast ran almost four hours and suffered the lowest viewership for the Oscars in history.
On Sunday, “Green Book,” the Universal Pictures film about race relations in the U.S. South in the early 1960s, won best picture, an upset over Netflix Inc., which had campaigned heavily for its film, “Roma.” This year’s Oscars didn’t have a host for the first time in three decades.
The ratings boost is a rare bright spot for the television landscape. Live events -- even high-profile ones like the Super Bowl -- have been losing viewers. Prior to this year, the audience for the Oscars had fallen every year since 2014. DM