Following the appeal for the trending #OscarsSoWhite boycott of the 88th Academy Awards 2016, the ceremony was watched by 34.3 million people only this year.
The number is the lowest in eight years yet.
The Oscars this year, which saw Chris Rock as host, chronicle of journalistic exposé "Spotlight" as best picture and popular actor Leonardo DiCaprio getting his first win in the best actor category for "The Revenant", all corresponded with the official US screencast's lowest ratings since 2008, according to The Guardian.
In 2008, 32 million viewed the show as the Coen brothers took best picture for "No Country for Old Men."
The ratings dropped 3 million viewers from last year's awards when 37.3 million people were viewing "Birdman" get the prize, and lower still (dropping 9.4 million viewers) from 2014, when Ellen DeGeneres' hosted the show and "12 Years a Slave" won the prestigious awards. 43.7 million people tuned in to watch DeGeneres host.
Civil rights activists like Al Sharpton, who had asked viewers to tune out of the show as an act of protest against their failure to nominate a single actor of colour for the second consecutive year believed the boycott had been at least a part success.
He blogged, calling this "heartening news." He added that it was a message, a clear one, sent to the Academy and to movie studio executives against accepting discrimination. He said they did not claim to take full credit for the drop in viewer ratings but did take partial responsibility for it.
This did not mean that the awards did not ragingly trend of social media yet another year.
In fact, DiCaprio's win for best actor broke the record of most popular Oscars-related moment on Twitter, beating even the very famous selfie that DeGeneres took in 2014. The selfie featured Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Lupita Nyong'o, Jared Leto and Angelina Jolie all in one star-studded selfie.
According to reports by Twitter DiCaprio's victory was the cause for over 440,000 tweets per minute,with a picture of Titanic co-star Kate Winslet hugging her Titanic co-star trending madly and DiCaprio's own thank you to the Academy re-tweeted over 350,000 times. DeGeneres selfie had a previous best of 255,000 tweets per minute.
