Is the Academy Building a Death Star at its New Museum?

By Steve Pond

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The Academy has tweeted a picture of a model of its upcoming Academy Museum of Motion Pictures - and from the looks of things, they're building a "Star Wars" Death Star adjacent to the former May Company building in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles.

And then they're surrounding their AMPAS Death Star with giant lollipops.

This has been a week of news about the museum, which is expected to open in early 2017. The Academy is conducting a fundraising campaign co-chaired by Tom Hanks and Annette Bening, and said it is more than halfway to its goal of raising $300 million for the project.

On Monday, it announced that the David Geffen Foundation has given AMPAS its single largest gift, $25 million, and that the theater in the museum would be named the David Geffen Theater.

The press release announcing the naming added that the project would restore the original Streamline Moderne fa?ade of the building, which was built in 1939 and spent most of its life as a department store before being taken over by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994.

And it mentioned a "spherical wing" that would house the theater at the north end of the building.

"Designed to represent the marriage of art and technology, the wing ... will be a spectacular new piece of contemporary architecture that will perfectly complement the historic building," the release said.

And now we know that the wing may also represent the battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, because on Thursday @TheAcademy tweeted a photo of an artist's model of the project, which is being designed by architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali.

"This is what our upcoming Academy museum is going to look like," read the tweet. "Only bigger. Much bigger."

The photo, above, features the existing building, including its distinctive rounded column at the corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Fairfax Ave. in Los Angeles - along with a rounded dome that carries unmistakable echoes of the purposely incomplete Death Star from the third "Star Wars" movie, "The Return of the Jedi."

More details were provided to a group of donors at a stakeholder meeting last week. We're probably jumping to conclusions to think that those donors were let in on a secret plan to use the building's death ray to zap the Golden Globes out of existence.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/academy-building-death-star-museum-013942053.html

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