Billy Crystal and Meryl Streep both end up big winners/photo by Noel West of the New York Times
Turns out Meryl Streep's win for outstanding actress wasn't the biggest surprise during Sunday night's Academy Awards. Ratings, which were expected to go down due to a lack of big-budget nominees and a less-than-hip host, actually rose 4 percent from 2011, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings.
That translates to 33.3 million viewers, not quite as many as the 33.9 million who watched the emotionally tinged Grammys, but enough to make it the most watched program on ABC in two years.
The network must already be scrambling to bring back Billy Crystal.
