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The Walking Dead
The series’s most recent episode, titled “Omega”, averaged a 1.7 rating in the key 18-49 demographic, down 15 per cent from the prior week’s midseason premiere, The Wrap reports
It also marked the show’s worst-ever performance with a total of 4.5m viewers turning in for the episode, down from 12 per cent from last week and less than the previous low of 4.71m for the first season’s second episode in 2010.
The Walking Dead faced stiff competition last Sunday from the NBC All-Star Game on TNT and TBS, which may have helped drive down numbers.
However, the show’s ratings have dropped significantly over the past few years, with viewership for season nine having been well below the previous season.
Show all 10 1 /10The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 10. Annie Hall These days, it sometimes seems heretical to admit to an admiration for Woody Allen but his best films stand up as well as ever. Annie Hall offers the New York based comedian’s familiar angst and also has a superlative performance from Diane Keaton as the free spirited, preppy heroine he falls in love with.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 9. The Best Years of our Lives William Wyler’s film about three veterans coming home at the end of the war still has a huge emotional kick. They’re from different classes and backgrounds but struggle terribly to readjust to civilian life. Some accuse the film of being pious and self-righteous but it deals frankly and very movingly with both the soldiers’ problems and those of their families and friends in understanding them. It won its best picture Oscar in the year in which It’s a Wonderful Life was also nominated.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 8. An American in Paris The best MGM musicals showed extraordinary artistry. This is one of the greatest. It’s not just the choreography or Gene Kelly’s wildly energetic performance as the aspiring artist in postwar Paris but the use of colour and sound. The ballet sequence at the end of the film stands alongside that in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes as a perfect example of filmmaking in which every element balances perfectly.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 7. Casablanca Producer Hal Wallis at Warner Bros had a knack for overseeing films that were both mainstream and had a social conscience. Not only did Casablanca have Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, but it also dealt with refugees, betrayal and wartime politics. The script by Julius and Philip G Epstein provided lines of dialogue about gin joints, rounding up the usual suspects and playing “As Time Goes By” that are still quoted today. Few other best picture winners are as engrained in the public consciousness as Casablanca.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 6. On the Waterfront Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront can be read as the director’s attempt at justifying his own craven behaviour, naming names in front of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, during the communist witch hunts. Its politics are complicated and contradictory. It is also magnificently acted. Marlon Brando gives arguably his greatest performance of all as Terry Molloy, the dockworker and pigeon fancier who could have been a contender in life and in the boxing ring if only his brother had stood by him when he needed him most.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 5. Lawrence of Arabia Easy to dismiss as a jingoistic widescreen epic, David Lean’s film about TE Lawrence makes astonishing viewing seen in 70mm. It also offers a probing and subtle portrayal of Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), the masochist who is both the quintessential English hero and the quintessential English outsider.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 4. All About Eve Joseph L Mankiewicz’s drama about a young actress on the make and the established star whose career she wants to usurp boasts some of the most caustic dialogue in any Hollywood best picture winner. The brilliance of Bette Davis as the star and of Anne Baxter as the seemingly ingenuous but utterly ruthless young pretender is matched by George Sanders’ wonderfully acidic performance as the theatre critic, Addison DeWitt.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 3. The Godfather Part II Still the greatest sequel in Hollywood history, this film emulated its predecessor The Godfather, in winning the best picture Oscar and out-stripped it in the brilliance of its craftsmanship and performances. Everything here, from Gordon Willis’s cinematography to the parallel stories of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone as the crime family boss in the late Fifties and Robert De Niro as his father Vito many years before, works near perfectly. The rival Best Picture nominees in 1974 included Lenny, Chinatown and The Conversation (also directed by Francis Ford Coppola). All would have been worthy winners in other years.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 2. Unforgiven The western was considered an anachronism and so was Clint Eastwood himself when Eastwood made his blood soaked masterpiece. Eastwood played Will Munny, first encountered as a farmer and family man. Gradually, we learn about his past as a gunman. “I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another, and I'm here to kill you, Little Bill,” he tells old rival Gene Hackman. This brutal and elegiac film was always a shoo-in for its Oscar.
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The 10 best Oscar Best Picture winners 1. The Apartment Only Billy Wilder could have made a romantic comedy based around infidelity, drudgery and office politics and turned it into a film as delightful as this. Academy voters are sometimes accused of self-righteousness and prudery, but thankfully that didn’t stop them giving the best picture Oscar to The Apartment.
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The loss is now only compounded by the departure of some of the show’s biggest stars, with both Andrew Lincoln and Maggie Cohen leaving earlier in the season and Danai Gurira set to make her exit next year.
That said, The Walking Dead still remains the most-watched non-sports program on cable and has already been confirmed for season 10.
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