LOCAL OSCAR PREDICTIONS PROVE TO BE BIG WINNERS FOR ACADEMY AWARDS

Perhaps odds makers and movie critics will look to Southeast Missouri for predictions of Academy Award winners next year.

A local survey conducted in advance of Monday's Oscar show was five for five in predicting the top honors.

Not only did local movie fans proved accurate overall, about 10 percent of those who participated in the survey picked all five winners right.

The survey was conducted online by SEMissourian.com, the official Web site of the Southeast Missourian newspaper. More than 1,000 votes were logged.

Local fans picked "Titanic" hands down. "Titanic" won 11 Academy Awards on Monday, tying it with 1959's "Ben Hur" for most Academy awards collected by one film.

The local survey also picked Jack Nicholson as best actor, Helen Hunt as best actress, Robin Williams as best supporting actor, and Kim Basinger as best supporting actress.

Local movie fans were among a record number of people watching the ceremony Monday.

The telecast was the most-watched Oscar ceremony of all time in the United States, ABC said Tuesday.

The show spun its own magic for ABC, scoring a 34.9 average rating and a 55 share. That compares with the 27.4 rating and 46 share for last year's show, when "The English Patient" won best picture.

A ratings point represents 980,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 98 million TV homes. Share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

The worldwide audience was expected by ABC to be around 1 billion.

The box-office popularity of "Titanic," "Good Will Hunting," "As Good As It Gets" and "The Full Monty" was a big part of the television draw. Last year's slate of best picture nominees grossed less than $75 million by Oscar time; "Titanic" alone has so far collected nearly $500 million in North American theaters.

"Last year the movies were fantastic, but they were just a little less populist, more esoteric," said ABC Entertainment Chairman Stuart Bloomberg. This year's nominees were more popular, so "the public had more of a vested interest in seeing who won."

Host Billy Crystal's assured performance also lured viewers. Although the telecast, which eclipsed by two minutes the 1984 record for the longest show, dragged toward the end, critics said Crystal shined in his sixth Oscar appearance.

Next year may be even bigger for the Oscar show, when it's expected to move to Sunday night, traditionally the night with the largest audience.

The Oscars still don't match the Super Bowl as a television event. An estimated 133 million people watched the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers in January.

Some information provided by the Associated Press.