Starting in 2029, the Oscars will no longer be broadcast from the film capital of the world (though that arguably hasn’t been Hollywood for some time now). While they’ll still be held in Los Angeles, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and AEG announced Thursday morning that, after m ore than two decades there, the glitzy award ceremony will move from the Dolby Theatre nine miles or so to Downtown—the Peacock Theater in L.A. Live, to be exact. The venue change will coincide with the Academy Awards’ on-screen move from ABC to YouTube. The Disney-owned broadcaster has aired the awards for 50 years, but the traditional televised version of the show will end after the 100th edition of the Oscars, the same year the awards will make their move from their longtime home of the Dolby. The Academy’s new partnership with AEG will continue through 2039. The move to the current Peacock Theater (the venue’s name is expected to be changed by that time) isn’t surprising in and of itself. The massive theater has been hosting television stars at the Emmy Awards for the better part of the last two decades—stretching back to when the oft-renamed venue was called the Microsoft Theater and, before that, the Nokia Theatre. The Grammy Awards, meanwhile, are typically held right across the street at the Crypto.com Arena. The Peacock’s 7,100-capacity space means that more of the Academy’s 11,000 members will be able to attend the show (versus the 3,400 that the Dolby holds), and L.A. Live’s campus, with multiple venues and a recently expanded plaza, offers more room for awards-season activities, red-carpet action and broadcasting in the same place. Photograph: Noah Sauve / Shutterstock.com And it’s definitely not the first time the Oscars have changed location—nor the first time they will be held Downtown. The awards ceremony actually got its start catty-corner from the Dolby at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in 1927. Over the years, presenters handed out statuettes at the Biltmore Hotel, Ambassador Hotel and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, to name just a few of its former homes, and then alternated between the Shrine Auditorium and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for years. The Dolby Theatre (née Kodak Theatre) has been the Oscars’ most consistent home though, since 2001 (besides the strange pandemic-era ceremony held at Union Station). Indeed, the huge five-story theater that anchors the Ovation Hollywood (formerly Hollywood Highland) complex was designed specifically to host the Oscars, from the width of its stairs to the size of its orchestra pit to space to hide broadcast cables. Which begs the question: What’s going to become of it after its star attraction departs? Photograph: K I Photography / Shutterstock.comThe “Best Picture” Oscar winners that line the staircase to the Dolby Theatre Currently, the Dolby’s upcoming calendar consists of the IHeartRadio Music Awards, followed by eight PaleyFest panels, a stop on the live tour of Dancing With the Stars and, in May, a few high-profile Netflix is a Joke shows, as well as a handful of miscellaneous concerts, comedy shows and, come Christmastime, a string of Nutcracker performances by the Los Angeles Ballet. While it typically hosts supplemental Broadway in Hollywood shows when the Pantages Theatre is occupied with a long-running production, there currently aren’t any on the schedule. But undeniably, part of the appeal of seeing any show at the Dolby Theatre—of navigating the headache that Ovation Hollywood can be—is knowing that you’re walking in the footsteps of every A-lister you’ve seen on screen over the past few decades and imagining the stage all done up for the annual awards show. It’s easier to deal with the grime of Hollywood Boulevard knowing that one night a year, it’s home to the most high-profile red carpet in the world. And what will become of the Dolby’s walkway, where the names of past best picture winners are memorialized on Art Deco columns? Luckily, there are still a couple of years for the Dolby to figure out its next act (though Americana at Brand Memes has one idea). ...read more read less