Bruce Feldman, a veteran awards strategist and publicist, has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1986.
Quite a few people reacted with surprise or dismay at the news announced yesterday that the Academy Awards, starting in 2029, will be moved from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood to the L.A. Live complex downtown. I am not one of them.
I grew up watching the Academy Awards on TV when they were held at the Pantages in Hollywood and the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica. Since entering this work, I have attended twice, once at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown and once at the Shrine Auditorium near the USC campus. And in the 24 years since it moved to Dolby, I’ve never missed it.
In other words, I have enough time and perspective under my belt to realize that things change, and that change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even when it comes to something as tradition-bound as the Oscars.
Actually, to me, the move to LA Live seems like a good thing – as long as the Academy does the right thing and remembers its members.
For decades, only a very few Academy members were able to attend their own event due to space constraints at the Dolby Theater. It offers only 3,300 seats, most of which are always in demand for candidates, their teams, families and friends; Bidders; Academy Governors; And members of the press. Ordinary members of the academy had to enter a lottery, and anecdotally, not many of them seemed to win.
However, the Peacock Theater has more than twice as many seats – 7,100 to be exact – and I feel strongly that the vast majority of those seats should be offered to Academy members.
More generally, it has long been a frustration of mine that the academy takes its members and their expertise and experiences for granted, or at least often acts as if it takes them on. An example of this is the decision to move the Academy Awards ceremony. The Academy leadership may have come up with the move that would best serve the Academy and the Oscars — as I say, I think they did — but they did it wrong. They should have at least sought the opinions of their members before making such an important change.
The sad truth is that in the 40 years I have been a member of the Academy, the President, CEO and Governors have never once done this on any major issue. Not when they went from five to ten Best Picture nominees, not when they announced a popular movie award, not when they tried to disenfranchise elderly members, and not when they removed several awards from the Oscars’ live broadcast — all steps they later had to reverse.
Presumably one of the reasons we invite people to become members of the Academy is because we have seen and done a lot of things that give us a special, expert perspective on our business. But you wouldn’t know it by the way we are consulted – or not – by our leaders. Some of the moves they’ve made in recent years—such as adding three “at-large governors” to their already large board, ignoring provisions in their bylaws prohibiting that, and then, a few months later, secretly amending their bylaws to correct that—make one wonder whether they’ve actually read our bylaws, or, for that matter, a book on nonprofit governance.
I’m proud to be a member of the Academy, it’s one of the highest honors in our business, in my opinion, short of winning an Oscar. But it loses some of its luster when members are treated as an afterthought when it comes to our biggest decisions and, yes, our biggest event. Although we were not involved in the decision to move our larger event, I hope that at least many of us will be invited to attend.
