Talk about a strange night’s viewing. While Australia struggled to stay awake as the Oscars droned on for four and a half hours last night, Sydney decided they were entertaining, and tuned in.

That gave Nine a big win on the night in that city and a win nationally to midnight, even though Nine was beaten in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. It really was the oddest night’s viewing for a long time.

Nine won the 6pm to midnight battle on the back of the Oscars’ late evening effort but Seven narrowly won the 6pm to 10.30pm all networks battle. Seven also won the so-called Zone 1 commercial share battle with Nine and Ten in the same timeslot.

Nine won the night simply because it knew there was a hardcore group of film buffs or other odd viewers who would stay with the broadcast until the bitter end. The big awards like best actress, best actor, best director and best picture happened from 11.40pm onwards.

There wasn’t so much a late turn-up for the main awards; it was more like an episode of Survivor with a steadily declining group of people battling to stay awake, with Nine’s hardcore movie nuts outlasting those watching other networks.

At 10.30pm, 940,000 people were watching Nine, ahead of the 788,000 watching Seven. Nine had around 37% of the available audience of 2.685 million people. By 11.30pm Nine’s audience had fallen to 700,000 but Seven’s was down to 372,000. Nine had more than half the 1.35 million people watching TV at that time.

By 11.45 to midnight, Nine’s audience was now down to 653,000, but still well over 50% of the 1.115 million people watching.

That’s why Nine won the 6pm to midnight battle: driven by the way Sydney supported the broadcast.

The so-called Red Carpet from 7.30pm to 8pm averaged 1.031 million and was beaten by Seven’s The Rich List. But again, the real action was in Sydney. The Red Carpet had its best audience there: 354,000, compared to 308,000 in Melbourne. The Awards broadcast averaged 405,000 in Sydney, (313,000 in Melbourne) equal to Desperate Housewives as the biggest audience in that market and the equal third largest audience nationally. But whereas Desperate Housewives averaged that number for an hour in Sydney, the Oscars did that number for four hours!

This of course raises that now regular question: why doesn’t Nine do a cut down and replay the highlights? It can’t. That would defeat the programming strategy of winning with the large late night audience. And as a rights holder, Nine has to broadcast the ceremony from start to finish. There is no provision for cutting it.