OSCARS LIKELY TO REMAIN YEAR’S NO. 2 TELECAST

Ratings for Sunday night’s Oscar awards telecast on ABC were up slightly from 2011, according to preliminary overnight figures from Nielsen Research. The show delivered a 25.5 household rating and a 38 share — up 4 percent from last year. That would put it a tad behind the 25.8/38 overnights for the Grammys two weeks ago but ahead of the 21.7/33 for the Grammys’ final ratings results. Those figures translated to 39.5 million viewers; the overnights for the Oscars, to 39 million. Highest ratings for the Oscars telecast were recorded in New York, with a 36.9 rating, followed by Chicago with a 33.8 rating. Los Angeles, the city that hosted the telecast, averaged a 31.9 rating, tying with Boston. Traditionally, the Oscars are the second-highest-rated telecast of the year after the Super Bowl, but it was widely predicted that this year’s show would fall behind the Grammy telecast, whose audience was boosted by curiosity about how the performers would handle the death of Whitney Houston, which occurred a few days earlier.