Oscar Ticket Crunch Hits Particularly Hard

Approximately 275 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not be having a Kodak Theatre moment this year because the move of the Academy Awards into the new venue has caused an enormous ticket crunch.

According to academy executive director Bruce Davis, allocating tickets to academy members “is never a fun part of the job.” But things are worse this year because the academy members have a “real interest” in the new venue.

“We have had more members request tickets than we have had in the past,” Davis said. “That has been a problem.”

The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion could seat nearly 2,700 people for the Academy Awards; the Shrine had a capacity for 5,600 guests. The academy, though, would leave the top of the expansive balcony empty, thus eliminating 1,600 seats. The Kodak Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland complex seats 3,300, but the number for the Academy Awards has been reduced by 200 because of special requirements for the TV broadcast of the Oscars.

Every year, the nominees, presenters, sponsors, members of the academy’s board of governors and “lots of other basic constituents” each receive a pair of free tickets. “The studios also have a modest block of seats that is expanded a little depending on how many nominations they have,” Davis said.

Seats that are left over go to academy members, who pay anything from $50 to $350 apiece for tickets.

Davis said the academy worked with the architects to get the maximum number of seats in the theater. “But it was a finite space,” Davis said. “There are more than 3,300 seats, but we still have to strike a few of those. We have always known the first two rows [in the orchestra] would go because the stairs go up to the stage.

“One of the whole thrusts of the design was to have that central camera position in the middle of the orchestra not obscure the seats behind it. We think we have pretty much accomplished that, but we did have to kill a row in front of [the camera]. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They were afraid that during a standing ovation, if people stood up they cover the TelePrompTer in front of that camera.”

Whenever the demand outweighs the supply of tickets, the academy holds a lottery. “We put the names in a kind of drum,” Davis said. “The scary thing was when we had drawn out as many this year as we could accommodate, the drum was still very full. We looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my Lord.’ We try to exempt them from the lottery in the subsequent year, but that is a lot of people. And next year is our 75th anniversary, so it’s not going to get better.”

Still, academy members think a simple phone call will get them a ticket.

“Unconsciously, people sort of equate the Academy Awards with the Super Bowl,” Davis said. “They think if they make enough calls there are going to be tickets around somewhere. The Super Bowl has around 100,000 tickets and we have around 3,000, and you just hit a point--which we hit a couple of weeks ago--where there are simply no tickets. To say ‘yes’ to anybody [for tickets now], somebody has to call in and say, ‘I won’t be able to use the ones you promised me.’ That does happen. People are very good about letting us know if they are not going to be able to use their tickets.”

But that wasn’t the case in the 1980s. “Fifteen years ago, there was a fairly thriving black market,” said Davis, adding that academy members and members of the press would often scalp their tickets. “They would be sold openly and offered in newspapers,” Davis said. “We really cracked down on it starting about a dozen years ago. It was a tremendous hole in our security net. You didn’t know who was in the room. In the era of celebrity stalkers, it was a danger all the time.”

None of the national ticket brokers will trade in Oscar tickets. “None of the concierges in hotels will attempt to get tickets for guests,” Davis said. “Maybe even more importantly, the L.A. Times and trade papers and [other] respectable papers have agreed to respect this as a private event. They will not carry ads offering either to sell or buy tickets.”

Plus, Davis said, members must sign at three points that they are going to use the tickets personally. “If a member violates that [agreement],” Davis said, “they are really putting their fellow members in danger, and the board will expel them from the organization.”