The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will move its annual Academy Awards® Presentation to the new Kodak Theatre at Hollywood and Highland for the 74th Annual Academy Awards in March 2002, Academy President Robert Rehme confirmed today. The move will bring the Academy Awards back to its Hollywood roots for the first time since 1960, when the Awards were held there at the Pantages Theater.
The new venue is almost directly across the street from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Academy Awards ceremony took place during a banquet held in the hotel’s Blossom Room on May 16, 1929. The attendance was 250 and tickets cost $10. The ceremonies honoring achievements in motion picture production during the year 2001 will be held on Sunday, March 24, 2002. Attendance will be approximately 3,300 and the least that Academy members will pay will be $100 for balcony seats.
The 74th Annual Academy Awards Presentation will be broadcast live by the ABC Television Network, beginning at 5:30 p.m. (PST), preceded at 5 p.m. by the Academy’s official pre-show.
In addition to the theater, the Hollywood & Highland venue includes a 30,000-square-foot ballroom in which the Academy’s Governors Ball will be held following the telecast. The Kodak Theatre will be the tenth venue in which the Academy Awards have been held. The Presentations have originated 25 times from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 11 from the Pantages Theatre, 10 from the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium, 8 times each from the Biltmore Hotel and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 6 from the Ambassador Hotel, 3 from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and once each from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Academy Award® Theater (at the Academy’s 1949 Melrose Avenue headquarters).
