The Oscars topped the audience of 15 million, surpassing last year

NEW YORK – Television ratings for the Oscars have risen somewhat from last year’s record low, but the event clearly doesn’t have the audience appeal it once had.

Sunday’s show reached an estimated 15.36 million viewers, according to preliminary figures from the Nielsen Company, released by ABC on Monday. More detailed estimates are expected on Tuesday

“CODA” won Best Picture on Sunday’s show, but impressed winners and losers alike. A comedy based on Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Best Actor winner Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett, took the stage by storm to slap Chris Rock.

Held in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, the 2021 show reached an astonishingly low of 9.85 million viewers. This has resulted in several changes to this year’s Oscars, including adding a host and awarding eight categories before the broadcast and editing on a live show.

While this seems to have helped, 15 million listeners are still below the 23.6 million people who saw the 2020 Oscars. Until last year, it was the lowest audience for an Oscar ceremony

Nielsen did not immediately have a specific audience for Sunday’s show, but research firm Samba TV said its own research did not show that the Smith-Rock incident had a significant effect on audience size as the show unfolded.