Alright carebears, so thee production designer realized that the big challenge for this year’s Oscars was conjuring up with elements that “created a sense of grandeur that are about different film eras without feeling too familiar or cliched.” Also declaring beautifully sounding to our ears, “For me, that is the challenge in designing the Oscars, finding images that feel both beautiful and grand, but also surprising.” And below are further in-depth, very intriguing specific analyzes of how thee entire spectacle came to manifest…
“Designing the sets for Hollywood’s biggest night of the year — the 90th Academy Awards, which aired March 4 live on ABC from the Dolby Theatre — started with a brief from show producers Jennifer Todd and Michael De Luca for “something big and grand.”
Says production designer Derek McLane, who is Emmy-nominated, with his team, for best production design for a variety special: “They also wanted something that celebrated a number of generations of moviemaking. So the show tried to capture different eras of filmmaking from the recent past to the early days of the Academy.”
The set featured a proscenium that was covered with an estimated 45 million Swarovski crystals. McLane started the process by bringing some initial sketches to Swarovski engineers. “Originally what I said is that we wanted, ideally, these giant pieces of crystal, but they kind of laughed and just said that would weigh millions of pounds,” he recalls. “So then we started to brainstorm about how we could actually make it. It was made out of faceted pieces of steel, but the steel was coated with very fine Swarovski crystals, which gave it a kind of sparkly look. But the scale came from these much larger facets of polished steel.
“The inspiration came from the inside of a geode — the dramatically faceted inside of a geode,” continues McLane, who has now worked on six Academy Awards ceremonies. “I thought that that would feel like a really bold gesture, something that would look amazing on camera. Within that was a series of sets that had to do with individual eras of filmmaking.”
One such set, which was used for the show’s opening, was inspired by a 1920s movie palace lobby, complete with the grand staircase and giant chandeliers and columns.
“We also had a closed-down show curtain for some of the show that was this kind of 1930s art-deco fan shape,” McLane adds. “The various shapes were made with silver and radiated out in kind of a giant silver satin curtain. That was a piece we used a couple of times throughout the show. It created a much shallower space; sometimes we used that while we were setting up some of the bigger moments of the show behind it.”
While not based on one specific decade, McLane also incorporated elements that paid homage to sci-fi. “We have these concentric steel rings with light bulbs on them that were very modern,” he explains. “They had a kind of technological, almost spacecraft like feel. We used those in a couple different configurations, in two or three different acts of the show.”
Other sets paid tribute to the movies featured in the musical numbers. For instance, the “Remember Me” number from Disney/Pixar’s Mexico-set Coco was a colorful set that combined built scenery with LED panels. “We had built a dimensional pyramid onstage, which was inspired by something that was in the movie, and it was ringed with light bulbs and had stairs coming down the center,” explains McLane. “There was a platform where dancers could perform.
“We created the illusion that it was bigger than it was by continuing that structure in the LED screens,” he continues. “Some of our LEDs could also move and track, so there was a big LED screen all the way upstage and then we had some smaller ones all the way downstage that had the ability to rotate and move across the stage.”
There were also some Dia de los Muertos-inspired masks, some on sticks and others in the LED content. Asserts McLane, “On camera, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s virtual.”
For this set, he says he spoke with and sought feedback from several Pixar filmmakers including Coco director Lee Unkrich and songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen-Anderson Lopez.
Overall, the production designer found that the big challenge for this year’s Oscars was coming up with elements that “created a sense of grandeur that are about different film eras without feeling too familiar or cliched. For me, that is the challenge in designing the Oscars — finding images that feel both beautiful and grand, but also surprising.”
McLane says that the show had about 16 different looks in all, but some pieces were used multiple times in different configurations: “For example, our movie palace look was used more than once, but we rendered it in different colors and with slightly different configurations onstage. The show is about 14 acts long and there isn’t the space or the resources to create 14 completely different, unique looks. Part of the art of that is trying to combine things in a clever way.”
