WITH LAST YEAR'S OSCAR viewership at an all-time low, the Academy has turned to a New York architect, David Rockwell, to "redefine the show's DNA", as he puts it. The first architect to come in as designer, Rockwell – along with the executive producer Bill Condon (director of Dreamgirls) and veteran producer Laurence Mark – is turning back the clock, Benjamin Button-style, to recapture the show's nightclubby, champagne-popping, communal roots.
Even with People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, Hugh Jackman, as host, planning the ceremony is a daunting and complex task in which the hybrid nature of the beast – a show on television celebrating the movies in a theatre – has long had an onerous Th
ree Faces of Eve quality.
"The Oscars are one of the great worldwide rituals," says Rockwell, 52, who designed the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, where the Oscars take place. "It's about celebration. We want to make it less a big, pre-taped package and more a live show. In a way, the Oscars are like community theatre on amazing steroids."
While many architects worship permanence, Rockwell, whose mother was a vaudeville dancer and choreographer, embraces the ephemeral, especially the one-night-only transformative power of theatre. His set designs on Broadway have included Hairspray and The Rocky Horror Show.
He is as comfortable analysing the sparkle of the 92,000-Swarovski-crystal curtain to frame the Oscar stage as he is waxing rhapsodic about Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, the paving of which will be reincarnated as colourful, shifting patterns of light on the Oscar floor.
The Oscars have given Rockwell the chance to reinvent the theatre he designed. The Kodak, which opened in 2001 as a custom-designed home for the awards ceremony, is itself a set, combining opera house verticality with made-for-TV techno-wizardry. This year, the dominant colour scheme will shift from red to a rich, deep blue, a shade inspired by Joseph Urban, the prolific stage designer of opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. Rockwell will also exploit some tricks he designed into the Kodak. Fluted crystal chandeliers will hover above the audience to give the impression of a low-ceiling nightclub.
For Condon, 53, who won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, and his Dreamgirls sidekick Mark, 59, spontaneity is the holy grail of Oscar night. "When you look at the old shows, you remember those spontaneous moments," says Condon, whose own favourite interlude occurred in 1999, when the Life Is Beautiful director and actor Roberto Benigni exuberantly climbed over the seats to accept an award. "They tend to happen when people are feeling loose and alive. So you hope to give people the loosest party you can in which to celebrate. At some point we've stopped making this a communal experience. It's been more about pleasing the television."
The first Oscar ceremony – in 1929 in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel – was a cosy, festive affair in which guests supped on lobster Eugenie. In 1953, when the show was first broadcast in America, Bob Hope wore tails, stars referred to one another as Mr and Miss, and there was no air-kissing. In that era "most movie stars didn't appear on TV, so it was a novelty", the film historian and critic Leonard Maltin says. Only the principal winners were allowed to make speeches and the set consisted of potted bougainvillea, Greek columns and a human-scale Oscar, perched on an ersatz wedding cake.
Since then, of course, a gold-encrusted visual style has evolved, typically dominated by gargantuan Oscars, including last year's show, hosted by Jon Stewart, in which towering Oscars were encased in see-through capsules, resembling the orgasmatron in Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper.
"Everyone involved in the show is highly conscious that it represents Hollywood to the world," Maltin says. "So it has to be, in some sense of the word, spectacular."
