Smallest Audience in Three Years for the Oscar Telecast : Ratings: The show is seen in 25.7 million homes compared with 27 million last year. Even so, it demolished the competition.

The Academy Awards telecast on ABC Monday night was seen in 25.7 million U.S. homes, the smallest audience for the glitzy ceremony in three years, the A.C. Nielsen Co. said Tuesday.

Last year’s Oscar show, which was criticized for its campiness and slapped with a lawsuit for its unauthorized use of the Disney-copyrighted character Snow White, was seen in about 27 million homes across the country.

Though viewer interest was down, this year’s far more stoic broadcast--one TV critic called it “dismayingly tiny”--nonetheless grabbed 48% of the available audience and steamrolled its competition on the other three networks. NBC earned only a 15% share of Monday’s prime-time audience, CBS received a 13.5% share and Fox managed a 7.5% share for its two hours of programming.

The lengthy Oscar telecast fared much better, however, in the nation’s larger television markets. In Los Angeles, for example, nearly 2 million television sets--watched by an estimated 5 million residents--were tuned to the internationally flavored broadcast that honored the movie industry’s achievements of 1989. And though the announcement that “Driving Miss Daisy” had been named best picture was not made until just after 12:30 a.m. on the East Coast, a whopping 61% of the available audience in New York, the nation’s largest television market, watched the show.

But in nearly all Eastern communities, the total audience dropped off sharply as the ceremony wore on into the wee hours.

Gilbert Cates, the producer of Monday’s telecast, did try to limit the length of the show by imposing a 45-second clock on most of the acceptance speeches, but the telecast still ran 3 hours and 37 minutes.

“I don’t think that (the Academy Awards) can go on too long,” Cates said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s a grand event. An event that is outsized. One that is large and imposing, one with its own dimensions. You can’t equate it with the traditional compulsive way you treat a two-hour TV movie or a sitcom. It’s like you went to a dinner and there’s talk and dinner and entertainment; who knows how long it will take?”

Monday’s telecast featured satellite linkups with Moscow, London, Buenos Aires and Sydney, Australia, in an effort to lend a feeling of global solidarity to the broadcast. The coup de gras of the technical wizardry came late in the broadcast when Diana Ross led people on five continents in an “everybody sing” rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”

The satellite hookups, which have become routine on news programs such as “Nightline,” came off with only a few minor technical flaws.

From Moscow, the voices of Jack Lemmon and Soviet actress Natalya Negoda echoed thunderously through the Soviet auditorium and then across the satellite bridge back to Los Angeles for several minutes until technicians in Moscow turned off their public address system. Cates wistfully suggested that the annoying feedback “lent authenticity” to the whole experience of linking such far-flung locales.

“The Academy Awards shows always reflect the year in which they were done, and the better shows reflect the year more accurately,” Cates said, explaining the idea behind the international hookups. “In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Look what happened in Czechoslovakia and in Africa. The world is getting smaller. So I think the feeling that we are part of an international community best reflected the year of movies we were celebrating.”

ABC estimated that 1 billion people around the world watched the annual parade of Hollywood’s elite, which was seen live via satellite in 39 countries. Another 50 nations--from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union to China--have licensed a 90-minute version of the broadcast for use in the future. This year, the Oscar telecast will be seen in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Morocco for the first time.

“The Barbara Walters Special,” which preceded the awards show on ABC in the East and followed it here on the West Coast, was seen in 18.7 million homes by 33% of those watching television at the time.