Bruce Feldman, a veteran publicist and awards strategist, has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1986.
Quite a few people have reacted with surprise or dismay upon hearing the news announced yesterday that Oscars ceremony, starting in 2029, will be moved from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to the L.A. LIVE complex downtown. I am not one of them.
I grew up watching the Oscars on TV back when it was held at the the Pantages in Hollywood and the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica. Since entering the business, I’ve attended it twice, once at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown and once at the Shrine Auditorium near the USC campus. And over the 24 years since it moved to the Dolby, I have never missed it.
In other words, I have enough time and perspective under my belt to realize that things change, and that change is not necessarily a bad thing, even when it comes to something as traditions-bound as the Oscars.
In fact, to me, the move to L.A. LIVE feels like a good thing — as long as the Academy does the right thing and remembers its members.
Bruce Feldman
Courtesy of Subject
For decades now, very few Academy members have been able to attend their own marquee event due to the space limitations of the Dolby Theatre. It offers just 3,300 seats, most of which were always needed for nominees and their teams, families and friends; presenters; governors of the Academy; and members of the press. Rank-and-file Academy members have had to enter a lottery, and anecdotally, it doesn’t seem like very many win.
The Peacock Theater, however, has more than twice as many seats — 7,100, to be precise — and it is my strong feeling that the vast majority of those should be offered to Academy members.
More generally, it has long been a frustration of mine that the Academy takes — or at least often behaves as if it takes — its members, and their experience and expertise, for granted. The decision to relocate the Oscars ceremony is an example. The Academy’s leadership may well have arrived at the move that will best serve the Academy and the Oscars — as I say, I suspect they did — but they went about it in the wrong way. They should have at least solicited the views of their members before making such a momentous change.
The sad truth is that, in the 40 years that I’ve been a member of the Academy, the president, CEO and governors have never done that once on any major issue. Not when they went from five to ten best picture nominees, not when they announced a popular film award, not when they tried to disenfranchise aging members and not when they removed several awards from the live Oscars telecast — all moves on which they subsequently had to backpedal.
Part of the reason people are invited to become members of the Academy, supposedly, is that we have seen and done a lot of things that give us a special and expert perspective on our business. But you wouldn’t know that from the way we are consulted — or not — by our leaders. Some of the moves they have made in recent years — like adding three “governors-at-large” to their already-massive board, ignoring provisions in the by-laws that prevented that, and then, a few months later, secretly amending their by-laws to rectify that — make one wonder if they have actually read our by-laws or, for that matter, a book on non-profit governance.
I’m proud to be a member of the Academy — it’s one of the highest honors in our business short of winning an Oscar, in my opinion. But it loses a bit of its luster when members are treated as an afterthought when it comes to our biggest decisions and, yes, our biggest event. Though we weren’t involved in the decision to relocate our biggest event, I hope that a lot more of us will at least be invited to attend it.