'Once upon a Time... in Hollywood': Oscars set to get a new venue

By Nicole Sperling

  The biggest night in Hollywood will no longer take place in Hollywood. Beginning in 2029 — the same year the Oscar telecast moves to YouTube — the Academy Awards will move to downtown Los Angeles, to L.A. Live, a sports-and-entertainment complex adjacent to the Crypto.com Arena. 

 

The annual award show will be held at the Peacock Theater, a venue with 500 to 1,000 more seats than the event’s current home, the Dolby Theater. 

 

The change is part of a deal that runs through 2039 between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), a global developer of sports and entertainment spaces.

 

 

The move will end the event’s decades-long relationship with the Dolby Theater located at the centre of Hollywood. The theater is just steps from where the first Oscars were held, in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

 

Yet this will not be the first time the Oscars will take place in downtown Los Angeles. The ceremony first moved downtown to the Biltmore Hotel in 1931. From 1969 to 1987, it was held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The academy then alternated venues between 

 

the Chandler and the nearby Shrine Auditorium for years until it moved back to Hollywood in 2002.

 

“We are thrilled to partner with a global powerhouse like AEG,” Bill Kramer, the academy’s chief executive, and Lynette Howell Taylor, its president, said in a statement. “Their track record for building and operating technologically sophisticated live performance venues is unrivaled.”

 

“L.A. Live was built to host the moments that define culture, and there is no greater global stage than the Oscars,” Todd Goldstein, AEG’s chief revenue officer said.