Oscar Show

After a decade of holding Hollywood's biggest night of the year at the Kodak Theatre, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences is considering moving its annual Academy Awards ceremony to the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Preliminary discussions about the potential relocation are underway between the academy and AEG, owner of the Nokia Theatre, according to a person familiar with AEG's operations who was not authorized to speak publicly. Officials at both the academy and AEG declined to comment.

The Oscars are going to be a little later next year. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Monday the dates for the next two years' ceremonies - March 2, 2014, and Feb. 22, 2015. With the shift, the 2014 awards season calendar is shaping up to be an unusual one, with a frenetic January full of guild awards and then a long lull until the Oscar telecast in March. (The show was Feb. 24 this year.) Oscars 2013: Winners list | Red carpet | Highlights On the bright side, the later award date does give voters more time to see all the contending films.

After the coffee. Before seeing how 'Smash' did in the ratings. The Skinny: I tried to get back into "Smash" last night but they lost me for good with the "Would I Lie to You" number. "Smash" makes me appreciate "Nashville" all the more. Wednesday's headlines include Fox looking to get an early jump on next year's Super Bowl, CBS talks on the record about Joe Flacco's swearing and why they don't want to put a delay on live sports and Liberty Media buys British pay-TV operator Virgin Media.

Re “ An ' Argo ' Night ,” Feb. 25 Mark it as insult to injury that an unspeakably vile “joke” about Lincoln having been shot in the head by an assassin is not even mentioned in The Times' front-page account; it is emblematic of a hopelessly jejune Oscar show. You might have noted, in answer to host Seth MacFarlane's question (“Too soon?”), that 150 years after Lincoln, 50 years after JFK and weeks after Sandy Hook is, yes, too soon. None of these things, with or without time, is funny.

David Rockwell crafted the current home of the Academy Awards show. Now he gets to jump in on Hollywood's big night itself. Rockwell will be production designer for the Oscar show Feb. 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Thursday.

It's early Friday morning, three days before the 64th Academy Awards show, and the pattern for producer Gil Cates' day has already been set. He's been interviewed by the "CBS Evening News" for an Oscar advance to run Sunday night. He's assigned an assistant to find out if they can use the music of a song for which emcee Billy Crystal has written some new lyrics. And he has just learned that Crystal, who's been fighting a cold, is too sick to make the afternoon's rehearsals.

Don Mischer was having a meeting in his Beverly Hills office last summer when the hyper, curly-haired movie producer Bruce Cohen showed up unexpectedly. "Bruce comes bursting into this meeting, saying, 'I have to talk to you immediately," said Mischer. "We went into my kitchen, and he said, 'Do you want to do the Oscars with me?' Of course, I was walking on air for the rest of the day. " Once the elation dissipated, the two got to work planning an event that will mark Oscar history and its current nominees in part by using elaborate contextual set pieces, bringing in a public schoolchildren's choir and, of course, tapping James Franco and Anne Hathaway as unlikely hosts, a decision the producing duo is thrilled with.

The 64th Annual Academy Awards, Monday live from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 6 p.m. to conclusion on ABC Host: Billy Crystal Presenters include: former Oscar winners Kevin Costner, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Douglas, Goldie Hawn; Dana Carvey and Mike Myers; Angela Lansbury; John Candy; Nicole Kidman; Susan Sarandon; Tom Hanks; Christopher Lloyd; Edward James Olmos, and Annette Bening. Irving G. Thalberg award: George Lucas

The Oscars, Hollywood's signature awards show that in recent years has spawned a costly, long-running and sometimes nasty campaign season, could move up a month under a plan being explored by the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

The Times coverage of the Oscar show was far, far too kind. It was an overstuffed turkey with a ghastly opening number featuring a Snow White who couldn't sing and a range of old stars barely identifiable. Halfway through the show came an elephantine number featuring so-called stars of tomorrow, which leaves me with even less desire to go the movies in the future than the present. The banter between the presenters was so feeble and poorly delivered it was an embarrassment, although not nearly as embarrassing as the idea of this show being seen as representative of American culture in 91 countries.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition issued an open letter Tuesday to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expressing their unhappiness that the late "Real Women Have Curves" actress Lupe Ontiveros was not included in the telecast's "In Memoriam" segment. Ontiveros died in July. She was 69. The letter explains that Ontiveros was not a member of the academy, which was the reason for her omission, but it adds that the actress, sponsored by actors Miguel Sandoval and Edward James Olmos, was denied membership in the organization when she applied.  IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Oscars 2013:   Winner list   |   Red carpet   |   Highlights "It is astonishing that an actress of Ontiveros' caliber and experience was denied membership to the Academy," said the letter.

Seth MacFarlane may have sung about Oscar's losers, but he wasn't among them. Sunday's movie awards ceremony produced its best ratings in years, even as critics rapped the "Family Guy" producer for some off-color humor. An average of 40.3 million viewers tuned in to the live Oscar telecast on ABC, according to Nielsen. The ceremony - hosted by MacFarlane, the creator of TV's "Family Guy" and director of the movie comedy "Ted" - drew its best numbers since 2010 and were up a modest 2% over last year's show hosted by Billy Crystal.

The Oscars saluted Hollywood's best from the past year on Sunday night, honoring “Argo” for best picture, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence for lead actor and actress, and Ang Lee for director, to name only a few. Anne Hathaway's dream came true, and Quentin Tarantino gave us a “Peace out.” But what do the night's results - and the show itself - reveal about Hollywood, if anything? Times staff writers Rebecca Keegan and John Horn will recap and interpret the show in a video chat right here at 10:30 a.m. Monday.

Well, that didn't work. Despite the valiant efforts of Adele, Barbra Streisand and a surprisingly witty Daniel Day-Lewis, not to mention a last-minute surprise appearance by First Lady Michelle Obama as co-presenter of the best picture award, touted as the first Oscar telecast with a theme - a tribute to musical Hollywood - was long, self-indulgent and dull even by the show's time-honored dull-defining standards. And we had such hopes. The choice of Seth MacFarlane as host of the 85th Academy Awards offered the tantalizing possibility of a new sort of telecast - sharp, peppy, with more than a little bite.

Now that the dust has settled and cold reality has replaced airy speculation, it's clearer than ever that as far as the 2013 best picture Oscar was concerned, Hollywood's directors gave and took away. Not content with being the powers on the set, the 300-some members of the director's branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences demonstrated power of another kind. By setting into motion what has come to be known as the Year of the Snub, they left two key directors off of their nominations list and sealed the fates of both pictures involved, elevating one and all but burying the other.

Adele fans have been spoiled of late. The artist, whose tour and public appearances were cut short after being sidelined by vocal surgery in late 2011, has been forced into the public eye courtesy of award season. Sunday night she won the original song Oscar for "Skyfall," her latest collaboration with producer Paul Epworth and the theme to the last year's James Bond film of the same name.  She performed the song Sunday night , and kept her...

Fresh, new, bright, entertaining, sparkling, short . Those unlikely adjectives are a few of the favorite words chosen by Gregory Peck, Larry Gelbart, Robert Wise and Gene Allen to describe their plans for the 57th Annual Academy Awards March 25. Speaking at an informal breakfast at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Thursday, the show's four producers provided the first glimpse of this year's innovative Oscar-by-committee approach.

Tom Hanks brought his kids, Dan Aykroyd wore shorts and Paula Abdul couldn't stop giggling. Tonight's 62nd Annual Academy Awards were a day away. Pressure was mounting. And yet the final rehearsal for the Oscar ceremony Sunday had all the gravity of a frog-jumping contest.

The Academy Awards are the biggest fashion runway on the planet. When Jennifer Lawrence, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and other stars step out onto the red carpet Sunday, they will be primed to talk as much about what and who they are wearing as about the films that got them there. But it wasn't always this way. The first Academy Awards, held in 1929 at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, was a low-key affair - a small dinner and 15-minute ceremony. There was no red carpet, and no one's dresses were on display since the event was not televised.

BEIJING - Cecilia Wu, 18, is a self-described film freak. Despite the heavy workload of her senior year of high school here in the Chinese capital, she sees a movie every two or three days and has caught most of the films with Academy Award nominations. But Sunday night's ceremony is not so much a festive occasion for Wu as much as a reminder of how much she is missing. Only one of the best film nominees, Ang Lee's "Life of Pi," has been shown in Chinese movie theaters so far; "Les Misérables" is scheduled to open next week.