Designer puts together futuristic set for the Oscars

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Glamour bows to grandeur. And old Hollywood makes way for a futuristic flight of fancy that will turn the stage of the Kodak Theatre into a man-made magic trick come Sunday.The set for the 80th annual Academy Awards will be built around five dramatic columns containing Oscars, each wrapped in delicate layers of gold and silver leaf and rising anywhere from 18 to 25 feet above the royal-blue floor.But they won't stand as frozen sentinels. The Oscars will be crowned by Saturnlike rings and be covered with architectural sleeves or tubes that can disappear, as can the oversize statues themselves.The stage will be anything but static."I think it's masculine, I think it has a grandeur. I think it's surprising the different looks it can take. It's just hard to nail down stylistically," says the artist who designed it. "It's probably kind of moderne futuristic."The set marks the 18th time that Roy Christopher has served as production designer for the Oscar presentation. His previous assignment was two years ago when he created an homage to classic Hollywood glamour."The whole look of the show was based on old movie theaters," Christopher said in a recent call from a quiet office at the Kodak in Hollywood. "We actually used a little theater in my hometown of Fresno, the Tower Theatre, built in the '40s or '50s, as the model for the set."People loved it. They identified with it, they knew what it was, it was very curvaceous and glamorous, so that worked really well. This year, all of a sudden you're faced with a blank sheet of paper and you think, well, we can't go there again."He also couldn't repeat the art moderne retro look he created for the 75th anniversary (the year of "Chicago") or the set for the 77th Oscars ("Million Dollar Baby") featuring a spiral of Oscars and screens that were underfoot and jutted out over the black-tie audience.Christopher, who has won seven of his nine Art Direction Emmys for Oscar telecasts, says he played around with lots of ideas and did hundreds of sketches and doodles. Telecast producer Gilbert Cates suggested something futuristic, and Christopher found inspiration in the past, in a print of a grand space by 18th-century Italian artist Piranesi."We played with that and giant columns and then finally it all kind of came together. Classical futuristic, I don't know what to call it," he said, referring to the column components that can fly out, leaving only the floating rings."The director looked at it and said, 'I love this, it looks like the movie "Metropolis." ' "Although the writing of the show was on hold until the strike ended last week, Christopher was told his design would be needed no matter what.This year will mark the return of host Jon Stewart, who presided over the March 5, 2006, ceremony when "Crash" beat "Brokeback Mountain" to the Best Picture finish line.When Stewart steps out at 8:30 p.m. EST Sunday, he will be beneath a frosted, lighted oval arch that -- like much of the set -- can change colors throughout the night.The set represents the work of hundreds of people, from the five who work with Christopher translating his hand-drawn designs into computer renderings to the hundreds of people working at five scenic studios and as part of the stage crew at the theater.So far, nothing is keeping Christopher awake at night, but he said, "You know, this is all hydraulics, these tubes moving within tubes, and telescoping in and telescoping out and you might have someone standing inside one of the tubes and then it flies out, revealing the person."There are all kinds of things and you think, 'Oh, my God, this has to work, this has to work.' There's no danger involved; it's so over-engineered, but you want it to be cued properly and work properly and work smoothly."(Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)