Cinema’s Super Sunday : ABC lays out its Sunday best, including pre-awards coverage and an earlier start time, in hopes of nabbing and keeping fans.

When the Academy Awards began airing on television in 1953, theater owners approached the relationship warily, viewing the new medium as a threat to their business. The presentation settled on Monday in part because that was traditionally a slow night for movie attendance.

By now, exhibitors realize the Oscar telecast amounts to a major advertisement for the film industry, which helps explain its shift, after years of discussion, to broadcast for the first time on a Sunday.

The Oscar ceremony has been staged on Mondays for the last decade and 32 of the last 40 years. It would be 34, actually, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences delayed the event by a day in 1981 because President Reagan had been shot, and in 1989 the ceremony was held on a Wednesday due to religious holidays.

Despite that Monday tradition, this year’s move to March 21 is one both ABC and the academy hope will be beneficial from a viewership standpoint, since scheduling the ceremony for Sunday offers several obvious advantages.

For starters, ABC can begin the presentation a half-hour earlier, at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time, preceded by an exclusive 5 p.m. pre-Oscar show. As a result, the event, to be held at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, should end around 9 p.m. locally, preventing the telecast from running well past midnight on the East Coast.

“It allows us to give people on the East Coast a little bit of a break,” said academy executive director Bruce Davis. “[And] people on the West Coast won’t have to rush home.”

In addition, because prime time begins an hour earlier Sundays, ABC avoids the problem it faced this season when the network switched “Monday Night Football” to an earlier kickoff time.

“The viewing levels [in the East] drop precipitously past 11 o’clock, as people start going to bed,” said Larry Hyams, ABC vice president and director of audience analysis. “This way, we can more or less make the entire night an event.”

Sunday also has the distinction of being the week’s biggest night in terms of available audience. According to Nielsen Media Research, 101 million people watch TV during an average Sunday evening, compared to 99 million tuning in Mondays, which ranks second. (Viewing levels plummet to 83 million on Fridays, TV’s least-watched night, when many people go to the movies.)

About 45 Million Viewers Expected to Tune In

Even so, no one expects Oscar ratings to equal a year ago, when viewing soared, due to intense interest in “Titanic” and other popular nominees, to 55 million people viewing an average minute. Network officials anticipate an audience closer to the 45 million viewers the program averaged from 1992 through ‘96, before the Academy Awards slumped to a 12-year low in 1997, when “The English Patient” was crowned best picture.

Although televised award shows continue to proliferate, the Oscars remain the second most-watched event of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. The film showcase aired on ABC exclusively since 1976 and will continue on the network at least through 2008 under an extension secured last year.

Because the academy controls the broadcast’s content, part of the latest agreement includes a pledge from ABC that no more than 10 minutes of each hour will be devoted to commercial or promotional time.

“That’s beginning to be very unusual for large events like this,” the academy’s Davis noted. “We understand that it takes commercials to pay for the evening, but there are limits.”

Sources say advertising within the program reached the $1-million plateau this year for each 30-second commercial, up from slightly more than $900,000 in 1998. The most recent Super Bowl tallied an estimated $1.5 million per spot.

“Sales liked the idea of Sunday night because you have a higher number of sets in use, but you’re going to get the tune-in for the Academy Awards [no matter what],” said Marvin Goldsmith, ABC’s president of sales and marketing.

Barring an unexpected ratings collapse, the Oscars will continue Sundays for the foreseeable future. Although Fox unsuccessfully sought to counter the awards last March with a live boxing program, none of the major networks will aggressively challenge this year’s telecast. Fox has scheduled repeats of its Sunday lineup opposite the awards, while CBS and NBC will tentatively rerun the movies “Grumpy Old Men” and “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory,” respectively.

The Oscars traditionally attract the largest audiences in big cities, and viewing in Los Angeles usually far exceeds the national average. KABC-TV will again provide extended coverage before and after the ceremony, with pre-award shows to be offered on several other channels as well.