There was so much to discuss with this year's Academy Awards that I plumb forgot my eternal gripe: The oft-repeated claim that "a billion people" watch the Oscars. This is nonsense, as I've mentioned here before many times. What reminded me was an e-mail from Peter Dunning, who writes from Kawasaki, Japan. He says…
I am E-mailing you from Japan, where, for the past three years, the Academy has sold Academy Awards Show rights to a subscriber TV service called WOWOW. Because only about 2.5 million of Japan's 130 odd million movie fans subscribe to WOWOW, and because it shows in the afternoon on a weekday, probably a very small percentage of Japanese watch the show.
There you are. That's probably about as well as the Academy Awards do in any non-English-speaking country. The Nielsen people say that, this year, 41.8 million Americans watched. Where's the rest of that billion? (The Grammy Awards are now claiming two billion viewers, or a little less than a third of the population of the Earth — an amazing assertion when you realize that, this year, less than 20 million watched in this country.)