Nielsen said Monday that overnight ratings are also 21 percent lower than last year, when "The Departed" was named best picture.

The least-watched Oscars ceremony ever was in 2003, when there were 33 million viewers.

Nielsen has no estimate yet on how many people watched Sunday night, but based on ratings from the nation's biggest markets, the Oscars will be hard-pressed to avoid an ignominious record.

The show had a 21.9 rating and 33 share.

His top films are three Oscar winners — "The Godfather," "The Godfather: Part II" and "Lawrence of Arabia." Obama says his favorite actors are Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Angela Bassett.

Will Smith is Obama's pick to play him if a movie is made about his life, something the two have discussed.

"Will and I have talked about this because he has the ears!" the Illinois senator said in an interview slated to air Tuesday and Wednesday.

But campaigning doesn't

"It's a very big day," LeBlanc said from his studio. "It reminds me of when I won in 1985 for `Amadeus.'" The stylist shared an Oscar for best makeup for his work on Milos Forman's movie about Mozart.

LeBlanc, who has been busy with the New Brunswick hair salon he opened a year ago, created the hairstyle for Bardem's character in "No Country for Old Men," drawing on the mop tops of the British warriors in the medieval Crusades as well as the haircuts of the 1960s for inspiration.

Bardem won the best supporting ac

Rejecting the red carpet of a traditional debut, directorAlberto Arvelo said he chose to show "Cyrano Fernandez"outdoors in the crowded hilltop shantytown of San Miguel as amark of respect.

Projected late on Monday to hundreds of residents crammedinto alleys and standing on rooftops in the slum high above thecapital, the film tells the tale of a scar-faced slum gangleader who falls for a local beauty.

"Without these people we would not have been able to make

The guild says the deal was endorsed by 93.6 pewrcent of those who voted in Los Angeles and New York.

The contract was approved through a mail-in ballot that came after members were briefed two weeks ago on the deal and voted to end the 100-day strike that devastated the entertainment industry.

Under the contract, writers will get a maximum flat fee of about $1,200 for programs streamed on the Internet during the deal's first two years and then get 2 percent of a distributor's gross in year three.