That insane Best Picture mix-up came too late to save the Oscars' ratings

2017 gave us the most memorable Oscars in the show's 89-year history, after Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of the category's actual winner, Moonlight.

Alas, it was too late in the day to give the awards a curiosity-induced ratings bump; the show-stopping moment happened at the very end of the ceremony (which ended up being the longest Oscars telecast in 10 years, clocking in at an exhausting 3 hours and 49 minutes), after midnight on the East Coast.

Instead, the 89th Academy Awards ceremony continued its ratings slide -- averaging 32.9 million total viewers and a 9.1 rating in the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 demographic, which is a nine-year low for the show.

Last year's telecast pulled in 34.4 million viewers and a 10.5 rating in adults 18-49 with Spotlight claiming Best Picture and Chris Rock hosting.

The lowest-rated Oscars on record was the 2008 ceremony hosted by Jon Stewart, which drew 31.8 million total viewers and awarded the top prize to No Country for Old Men.

The highest-rated Oscars telecast came in 1998, when Titanic took home Best Picture and the telecast topped 55 million total viewers -- no surprise, given the mainstream popularity of the James Cameron epic, which remained the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Cameron's Avatar in 2009.

Despite the ratings erosion, ABC notes that the 2017 Oscars remained the highest-rated awards show of the year, besting the Golden Globes by 12.9 million viewers (the Globes drew a total of 20 million viewers in January), and the Grammys by 6.8 million viewers (the Grammys nabbed 26.1 million viewers overall) and currently ranks as TV’s top entertainment telecast in one year, since the 2016 ceremony.

According to Nielsen Social, a total of 8.4 million people generated 22.1 million social media interactions across Facebook and Twitter during the Oscars, with an estimated 73 percent of all social TV interactions on Sunday mentioning the telecast. We're guessing that a pretty big chunk of that number were freaking out about the Moonlight mix-up.