Audience up about 1 million from last year

Despite a show that dragged on past midnight Eastern time, ratings for the 2007 Oscars improved a little over last year's telecast.

An averaged of 39.9 million people watched the 79th annual Academy Awards on ABC Sunday night. That's an improvement of 1 million viewers over last year's Oscar telecast, which like this year lacked a big hit film that was up for a slew of awards.

"The Departed," the biggest box-office draw among the five best picture nominees, took home the most awards (four), including honors for best picture and best director Martin Scorsese, his first Oscar after five previous nominations in his career.

Ellen DeGeneres hosted the show, which ran about 3 hours and 50 minutes -- the longest Oscarcast since the 2002 show, which stretched over 4 hours. Despite the ratings bump over last season, it still fell a couple million viewers short of the 2004 and '05 Academy Awards shows.

ABC is also trumpeting improved ratings among younger viewers. The benchmark adults 18-49 rating for this year's show was 14.0, up just a tenth of a point from last year's 13.9. In the smaller group of adults 18-34, though, the awards improved from 12.0 in 2006 to 12.9 Sunday, the best in that demographic since 2002. Ratings in all the adult-women demos were up too.

The 39.9 million viewer average makes the Oscars the most-watched entertainment broadcast of this season. The season premiere of "American Idol," at 37.4 million, was the previous leader.

ABC says about 74.8 million people watched at least six minutes of the broadcast. Cut that down to one minute, and the number rises to 87 million.