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 on Feb. 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Thursday.
The 52-year-old architect, who has also handled the set design for “Hairspray,” ”Legally Blonde” and other Broadway productions, joins a team of fresh faces overseeing the 81st Oscar show, led by producer Laurence Mark and executive producer Bill Condon, filmmakers working on the ceremony for the first time.
“David is an innovator who possesses the outstanding combination of truly firsthand knowledge of the Kodak Theatre and superb design work in a variety of realms, including film and theater,” said Mark and Condon in a joint statement. “We’re pleased to be collaborating with someone whose talents are so diverse.”
Also new to the telecast is producer Roger Goodman, vice president of special projects at ABC. Goodman, a multiple Emmy winner who will direct ABC’s presidential inauguration coverage a month before the Oscars, has many major sporting events, news programs and awards shows to his credit, including the Academy Awards Countdown Show.
The ceremony is in the early planning stages and nominations will not be announced until Jan. 22, but Rockwell had one early prediction about the show.
“I think we’ll see things never seen before at the Oscars,” Rockwell said. “One of the things about the Oscars is there are such thrilling possibilities. It is one of the great kind of communal rituals of the entire world.”
His firm, New York City-based Rockwell Group, designed the 3,500-seat Kodak Theatre in the heart of Hollywood, the venue for the Oscar show since 2001.
Other Rockwell Group projects include the W New York and W Union Square hotels; Nobu restaurants in New York, Melbourne, Australia, Hong Kong and elsewhere; and the Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center.
Besides his sets for live theater, Rockwell worked on the design of the miniature world in “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police,” a comedy whose stars were 2-foot-tall puppets.
Rockwell’s mother was a dancer and choreographer and his family was heavily involved in live theater when he was growing up. An architect for 23 years, Rockwell began branching out into set design about 10 years ago.
He describes designing the Oscar sets in appropriately artistic terms.
“It’s almost like the setting for a jewel, designing the set, the environment that allows this celebration to happen in,” Rockwell said.
The retro look of the Kodak Theatre, designed to resemble an ornate 1920s movie house, has been seen worldwide by the Oscar audience. Is Rockwell nervous at the prospect of his designs now taking center stage for Hollywood’s most-visible event?
“I find the way I gauge a project that’s really going to engage me is, it exists right on the edge between thrill and terror,” Rockwell said. “This fits right into that.
Apple and Google Face UK Investigation Into Mobile Browser Dominance
Apple and Google aren't giving consumers a genuine choice of mobile web browsers, a British watchdog said Friday in a report that recommends they face an investigation under new U.K. digital rules taking effect next year.
The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at Apple, saying the iPhone maker's tactics hold back innovation by stopping rivals from giving users new features like faster webpage loading. Apple does this by restricting progressive web apps, which don't need to be downloaded from an app store and aren't subject to app store commissions, the report said.
"This technology is not able to fully take off on iOS devices," the watchdog said in a provisional report on its investigation into mobile browsers that it opened after an initial study concluded that Apple and Google effectively have a chokehold on "mobile ecosystems."
The CMA's report also found that Apple and Google manipulate the choices given to mobile phone users to make their own browsers "the clearest or easiest option."
And it said that the a revenue-sharing deal between the two U.S. Big Tech companies "significantly reduces their financial incentives" to compete in mobile browsers on Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones.
Both companies said they will "engage constructively" with the CMA.
Apple said it disagreed with the findings and said it was concerned that the recommendations would undermine user privacy and security.
Google said the openness of its Android mobile operating system "has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratize access to smartphones and apps" and that it's "committed to open platforms that empower consumers."
It's the latest move by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to crack down on the... Read More