HOLLYWOOD — The metal barricades arrived on flatbed trucks this week and were stacked in long silver rows along Hollywood Boulevard, the first visible sign that the neighborhood is about to close much of itself for a night.
The Academy Awards return to the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood and Highland on Sunday, and with the ceremony comes the annual choreography of street closures, security perimeters and no-parking signs that reshape the center of Hollywood for the better part of a week. City transportation officials have published a schedule of rolling closures that tightens as the day nears, sealing off blocks around the theater and rerouting traffic and buses onto side streets.
For the venues inside the footprint, the closures are the price of the biggest night on the local calendar. For the businesses a block or two outside it, the calculation is less flattering. Several merchants said the security cordon and the snarled traffic keep ordinary customers away without sending any of the red-carpet crowd their direction.
“People think Oscar week is good for everybody on the Boulevard. It’s good for the people inside the fence,” said Priya Sethuraman, who manages a clothing shop a few blocks east and expects the week to cost her more in lost foot traffic than she makes back. “My regulars can’t park, can’t turn, can’t get here. And nobody in a gown is walking down to buy a T-shirt.”
The city says it works to keep the disruption contained, staging closures block by block and keeping some sidewalks open behind the barricades. A transportation spokesman urged residents to use the Metro station at Hollywood and Vine rather than drive into the area, and acknowledged that the closures, however well planned, are an imposition on a working neighborhood that does not clear out just because a ceremony is in town.
Residents in the apartments near the theater have their own routine. They move their cars early, warn their guests, and settle in for a few days of helicopters and generator hum. A woman walking her dog past a row of barricades on Thursday said she had lived through fifteen of these and knew the drill: park by Wednesday or don’t park at all.
The Boulevard’s marquees played their part in the buildup, the old theaters lit against the evening while camera crews tested positions along the closed blocks. By the weekend the security perimeter will harden, the bleachers will fill, and the stretch of sidewalk that carries the names of a century of stars will be, for one night, off-limits to the public that usually walks it.
Then the barricades come down. Crews will stack them back onto the flatbeds on Monday, sweep up the confetti and the trampled programs, and reopen the streets, and the shop owners outside the fence will wait to see whether the customers they lost for the week decide to come back.