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, home of the Lakers basketball team and the Kings hockey team.
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 AEG, a global developer of sports and entertainment spaces.
The move will end the event’s decades-long relationship with the Dolby Theater, previously called the Kodak Theater, in the center 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.”
As part of the partnership, AEG will make many improvements to the theater, including upgrading the lighting and sound systems, the stage and the backstage areas. The downtown complex also has a newly expanded pedestrian-only plaza that can easily be used for the large red carpet that accompanies the show. Today, the academy converts the busy Hollywood Boulevard into its red carpet, shutting down the thoroughfare for weeks ahead of the ceremony.
L.A. Live opened in 2007 and has hosted many awards shows, including the Emmys and the Grammys. It is also surrounded by a couple of high-end hotels and restaurants that have made the area a popular venue for big events.
“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 in a statement.
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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