HOW IT STARTED: Oscars 2026 First Look: This Year, the Stage Is a “Sanctuary of Celebration.”
The Academy Awards is Hollywood’s biggest night on its biggest stage—and this year, that stage is an especially zen space.
Each year, production designers Misty Buckley and Alana Billingsley reimagine the stage at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre. Some years it’s grandiose and bold; other years it harkens back to the golden era of Hollywood. But it’s never been as green as it is this year.
This year’s design—debuting exclusively with Vanity Fair—is especially unique. The theater has been designed to represent a calming garden courtyard, with greenery woven throughout it. It’s an ode to this year’s pointedly handmade theme—“A Human Touch”—as well as an attempt to create what feels like a relaxing space in a chaotic world.
“There is an unsettled nature around the climate right now, and there’s just something very calming about being surrounded by architecture, but having this space for trees to grow,” Billingsley tells Vanity Fair. “We are exploring the contrast between the organic and the rigidly architectural, and that creates the feeling that life can exist anywhere.”
How it’s going:
Ahhh…the Dolby Theatre the morning after:
a once-hallowed coliseum of counterfeit grandeur now gutted into a rancid abattoir of shattered bottles, crumpled prestige, and the stench of three hours’ worth of performative excess.
This isn’t “cleanup.”
This is the autopsy… https://t.co/lGX3j3dcnL
— LHGrey™️ (@grey4626) March 16, 2026
Yet another to ignore Tinseltown’s environmentalist fervor: “This trashed mausoleum is the only honest Oscar they earned last night…the trophy of their own degeneracy, captured in high definition for anyone with eyes and a spine to see. The immigrants they exploit will clean it. The rest of us will remember it. And the Hollywood trash will pretend, once again, that none of it ever happened.”