Ratings for Sunday night's broadcast of the Academy Award ceremony on ABC reached an all-time low, as viewers tuned out the show almost every half-hour starting at 9 p.m. in the East. The rating, a 26.2, was down sharply from last year, when the show scored a 29.2. (Each rating point represents 1.02 million homes.) This year's number fell below the previous worst-rated broadcast, in 1986, which scored a 27.3.
The show did not even attract as many viewers as the first episode of ''Survivor'' on CBS this season. It also fell far short of that series in reaching viewers 18 to 49, the group that ABC most covets. The season premiere of ''Survivor'' scored a 21.8 rating in that group; the Oscars scored only a 17.8. ''Survivor'' had 43.3 million total viewers as opposed to 42.9 million for the Academy Awards.
The competition on the other broadcast networks was hardly formidable: movies that had already run on television. But each of them showed growth during the night, and one, ''True Lies'' on Fox, managed to be especially effective with young viewers, even though the network had screened it four times before.
''True Lies'' wound up as the fourth-highest-rated movie of the season among young adults and pulled higher ratings for that group than it did the third and fourth times it was shown.
The drop-off at 9 p.m. also led to widespread speculation in the television industry that the Oscars may have been damaged by HBO's ''Sopranos,'' which started at that time. HBO's ratings will be released today.
Another factor cited yesterday within the industry was a proliferation of televised awards shows preceding the Oscars featuring the same stars nominated for the same films. The Golden Globes on NBC and the Screen Actors Guild award on TNT received widespread attention this season.
By the time Julia Roberts won her best actress award for ''Erin Brockovich'' on Sunday, she was giving her third televised acceptance speech for the same movie.
