ONE BILLION.(The Talk of the Town)

About the Oscars this Sunday, one thing may safely be predicted: someone will do something embarrassing onstage, and someone else will point out that it was done in front of a billion people. It is common knowledge that the Academy Awards are watched by a billion people around the world. "They keep reminding you, like, every two seconds," Cate Blanchett, who is a nominee for Best Supporting Actress, recently complained to Oprah Winfrey. Last year, the figure cropped up in the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News, The Economist, and dozens of other publications. If anyone remembers a single speech from last year's Oscars, it is probably the one made by Andrew Stanton, the co-director of "Finding Nemo," who told his wife, "I wrote it to you in a note in eighth grade, now I can say it in front of one billion people: I love you."

But the worldwide audience for the Oscars isn't even close to a billion, as a little common sense makes plain. In the United States, 43.5 million people watched the show last year. That's a lot, but it's 956.5 million short of a billion. Can the show really pick up that many viewers in countries that most of the films and people being honored are not from, and where the speeches are in a language that most of the population does not speak?

One way to calculate that the Academy Awards could almost reach a billion viewers is to assume that since the domestic audience of 43.5 million amounts to fifteen per cent of the American population, maybe fifteen per cent of the world population also watches. That would make nine hundred and sixty million, close enough for rounding up. There are a few problems with this assumption, though. The first is that even though the ceremony is broadcast in more than a hundred and fifty countries, in many of those it is available only on satellite or cable channels that have relatively few subscribers. If one uses some generous estimates (is it possible for every man, woman, and child in Russia to get to a TV?), the total potential audience for the Oscars is around two billion. Fifteen per cent of two billion is only three hundred million. Few other countries track television audiences the way the United States does, so solid data are hard to come by, but the evidence isn't ...