• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 4, 2024

Three great moments tower above the rest in the TV Blog’s coverage of the Academy Awards over the last nine years.

Will we be treated to anything like them next Sunday on ABC when "The 96th Oscars" draws the attention of the world? We can only hope.

And on a more business-like note: Can the Oscars continue its mini winning streak of domestic audience increases? 

From the lowest-rated televised Oscars in history -- 10.4 million in 2021 -- the show grew to 16.6 million in 2022 and 18.7 million in 2023.

In the old days, sales and programming execs in both TV and radio used to look at the ratings and boil them down to a single question: “Can we get a rate for it?” The Oscars certainly do. Commercials reportedly went for $2.1 million a pop last year.

People sometimes disagree about the moments about to be singled out by the TV Blog as all-time Oscar highlights for several reasons.

Some do not like it when columnists and others emphasize mistakes, flubs and misbehaviors over the elation and excitement of the winners as they enjoy the greatest moments of their lives -- winning Academy Awards.

Having said that, it is also undeniable that the out-of-the-blue moments nobody ever expected in a million years are what get talked about, often more than who won or lost.

In 2017, it was Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty -- Bonnie and Clyde, respectively -- flubbing the Best Picture announcement at the grand finale. 

They said it was “La La Land,” but it was really “Moonlight.” This was a jaw-dropper for the history books.

In 2020, it was Joaquin Phoenix’s one-for-the-ages acceptance speech in which he thanked no one, but decried the human race’s treatment of cows. For the record, he won a richly deserved Best Actor Oscar for “The Joker” that year.

In 2022, it was Will Smith’s sensational, heart-stopping, totally unrehearsed assault of host Chris Rock onstage before a worldwide audience of hundreds of millions (or so everybody associated with the Oscars insists every year).

Few would deny that this was a riveting moment, and it supplanted all other awards news as the top headline from that year’s Oscar show. 

But at the same time, it was a very ugly, shocking incident that detracted from the rest of the show, which was especially unfair to the evening’s winners, who then took a back seat to Smith’s slap heard ’round the world.

What else to look for? One thing of interest to many is the way these gazillionaire stars and celebrities use their acceptance-speech time to hector the rest of us on the issues of the day -- wars, racism, gender, immigration, Donald Trump and more.

This is something I pay attention to because year after year, you hear the same thing, that the holier-than-thou speechifying from La La Land is a huge turn-off for many -- except, of course, Joaquin Phoenix’s moo-ving and impassioned advocacy for the well-being of cows.