The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) is more than an award giving body that gives out Oscars to the rich and famous every year. They are an organization with a goal to promote and advance the craft of cinema. Their yearly awarding ceremony, the Academy Awards (otherwise known as the Oscars to the general public) polls together the votes of 6,000 of their members, motion picture professionals deciding the year’s best artistic achievements. Apart from the Oscars, the Academy is also responsible for many cinema-related events and projects, such as operating the Margaret Herrick Library, the Pickford Center for the Motion Picture Study, the Governors Awards (awarding lifetime achievement in film and recognizing humanitarian acts within the industry), and the Student Academy Awards (which identifies the best undergraduate and graduate filmmakers), and by 2019, they are opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
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Highly anticipated by movie lovers around the world, the Academy has never kept the upcoming museum in the wraps. They occasionally update their social media account with photographs, tours of the construction site, and roundtable talks about the new project (most recently, Whoopi Goldberg facilitated a panel discussion for the Academy). Opening in roughly a year’s time, it will be the first large-scale museum solely dedicated to the craft, business, and rich history of the movies. Permanent exhibits will be interactive and allow visitors to immerse themselves in the history of Hollywood and the film industry.
Visitors will be treated to view thousands of original props and movie memorabilia from the Academy’s large archives. Several have already been announced to be on display, such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (1939), the tablets from Cecile B. DeMille’s Moses-drama The Ten Commandments (1956), Shirley Temple’s tap dancing shoes from The Little Colonel (1936), a surviving shark mold from the set of Jaws (1975), and the typewriter used to pen the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece Psycho (1960). Other permanent collections set to exhibit include 104,000 pieces of production art, 61,000 posters, 80,000 screenplays, 19,000 video properties, and over 12 million photographs that the Academy has been collecting since the 1930s.
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The museum will find its home in the historic May Company Building, which has been renamed the Saban Building (after Cheryl and Haim Saban bestowed a generous donation of $50 million to the museum). It will be 300,000 square-feet big with two buildings (including a large glass sphere with an events space on top) designed by the Pritzker-prize winning architect Renzo Piano. The project is led by museum director Kerry Brougher with NBC Universal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer, who acts as the head of the museum’s Board of Trustees.
There will also be 50,00 square feet of gallery space, an outdoor piazza, a restaurant, a memorabilia shop, sprawling view of the Hollywood Hills, and a rooftop terrace. Two theaters are also being constructed—the 1,000 seat David Geffen Theater to showcase the art of filmmaking, and the Ted Mann Theater. The latter will have 288 seas and offer special screenings of movies. For all your cinema lovers out there, be sure to watch out for this project. Follow the Academy on Instagram (@theacademy) for further sneak previews or visit their official website www.oscars.org. See you at La La Land this 2019!
