• by Masha Geller , March 25, 2002

Not surprisingly, today all talk is about last night’s Oscarfest. What is surprising, however, is that even though it was the longest academy awards telecast in history, clocking in at the record-breaking 4 hours and 23 minutes, ratings are actually up from last year. According to Nielsen Media Research, the telecast drew 46 million people according to preliminary measurement of 53 major media markets. That’s compared to just under 43 million who watched "Gladiator" win best picture last year.

Arguably the second biggest television event of the year after the Super Bowl, the Oscars failed to break any records online, drawing no more than about 650K visitors worldwide, according to the latest comScore data. That is somewhat of a surprise considering the hype surrounding this year’s awards.

Nevertheless, Oscar.com tripled its audience versus the day before (Saturday) and traffic grew 700% from one week before the Oscar airing. U.S. surfers favored sites such as ew.com and eonline.com, while official sites oscar.com and oscar.org -- as well as the film resource site imdb.com -- drew more than half of their viewers from elsewhere on the planet, comScore said.

Despite Denzel Washington's Oscar award, he took 4th in Web searches of Best Actor nominees: Russell Crowe, Will Smith, and Tom Wilkinson (in that order) all preceded him. By contrast, comScore said, Halle Berry was the undisputed champion not only among actresses, but of any nominated actress (or actor) in online searches.

Lord of the Rings dominated web-related searches across the "Best Film" category nominees, with Moulin Rouge and Beautiful Mind following. However, comScore said that since Lord of the Rings has such a broad reach in merchandising etc., one could consider Moulin Rouge to be the most popular "pure" film search.