Oscar TV audience rises to 40.3 million, show gets mauling

Reuters : Sunday’s Oscar ceremony scored the biggest TV audience in three years, and edgy new host Seth MacFarlane helped boost interest from young men, despite getting a mauling from TV critics.

Nielsen ratings data on Monday showed that 40.3 million Americans watched the Academy Awards ceremony on ABC television, up three percent from 2012. ABC said it was the largest Oscar audience in three years.

Boosted by a bumper box office crop of movies and intrigue over MacFarlane’s debut as Oscar host, the show grew 11 percent in the 18-49 year-old audience most coveted by advertisers, and by 34 percent in 18-34 year-old men compared to 2012.

After a night of zingers about gays and Jews and risque jokes about female nudity, the man behind animated TV series “Family Guy” largely lived up to his own prophecy - at least judging by traditional media - that he could be deemed the worst host in Oscar history.

Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield said MacFarlane appeared like a “bumbling rookie” and “few ideas could have been stupider” than turning the Academy Awards into a “Seth MacFarlane variety special.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against anti-Semitism, said it was “sad and disheartening” that the Academy Awards show had “sought to use age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes for laughs.”

The group pointed to a sketch in which MacFarlane’s puppet bear Ted remarked to the A-list crowd at the Dolby Theatre that it’s better to be Jewish if you want to work in Hollywood. “When one considers the global audience of the Oscars of upwards of two billion people, including many who know little or nothing about Hollywood or the falsity of such Jewish stereotypes, there’s a much higher potential for the ‘Jews control Hollywood’ myth to be accepted as fact,” ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement on Monday.