Sara Nathan
A ring of steel has been thrown around the venue for the 96th Oscars which take place on Sunday amid fears pro-Palestine demonstrators will try to ruin Hollywood’s biggest night.
The area around the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles has been blocked off with chainlink fencing as part of early preparations which will eventually involve thousands of law enforcement and security personnel.
Police and organizers will want to avoid a repeat of the Grammy Awards when arrivals at LA’s Crypto.com Arena were brought to a halt by pro-Palestinian supporters who blocked traffic.
The protestors gleefully shared footage online with the hashtag #ShutItDown4Palestine. At the event itself, Annie Lennox called for a ceasefire during her tribute to Sinéad O’Connor.
The Oscars security measures are being designed to prevent protesters attempting to interrupt the Sunday night show.
An interruption would give them a platform among as many as 20 million Americans watching live, millions more around the world and a much larger social media audience.
Anti-Israel demonstrators have increasingly targeted high-profile events.
On Saturday, First Lady Jill Biden was interrupted by protestors calling for a ceasefire, yelling, “It’s genocide”, while speaking on her “Women for Biden-Harris” tour in Tucson, Arizona.
And pro-Palestinian marches have brought chaos to NYC ever since the October 7 terror attacks in Israel — including on Saturday, when the NYPD bomb squad struggled to get to an Uber in Times Square whose driver had discovered a grenade on the back seat.
Nearly a dozen people were taken into custody after police were met with a swarm of protesters.
An LAPD spokesperson told The Post Monday, “We will deploy enough officers to ensure the safety of all the citizens and Oscar attendees. We hope for the best and are prepared for the worst.”
Alongside many of the LAPD’s 9,000 officers will be federal agencies including the FBI.
The Oscars carpet will be laid down amid great fanfare Wednesday ahead of the ABC show, once again hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, with security around the Dolby Theater in Hollywood set to be stepped up for that event too.
Sources at the Academy Awards said that the safety and security of attendees is paramount, adding that the organization would not tolerate any behavior that actively endangers, discriminates or causes bodily harm to attendees or members of its global film community.
Any interruption to the red carpet or the show risks highlighting how Hollywood has been at odds over the Israel-Hamas war — with conflicts that have spread within the top talent agencies in Tinseltown.
But sources told The Post that the Oscars organizers will not attempt to censor winners’ speeches.
Hollywood has remained largely silent on the conflict during awards season, aside from a few stars including J. Smith-Cameron of “Succession” and John Ortiz of “American Fiction” who sported a yellow ribbon to show support for Israel hostages at the Golden Globes in January.
Oscar nominees Bradley Cooper and Mark Ruffalo, alongside Selena Gomez, Joaquin Phoenix and Quinta Brunson were among more than 260 artists who signed an October letter urging Joe Biden and Congress to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
However, James Wilson, the producer of Oscar-nominated movie, “The Zone of Interest”, the harrowing Polish historical drama set on the outskirts of Auschwitz, spoke out at the British BAFTA awards in London last month.
The film, which follows a commandant who lives in an idyllic home with his wife and five children next to the camp, took home three awards: best sound, best British film, and best film not in the English language.
Accepting the final prize, Wilson used the platform to call for an end to “selective empathy” in conflict, drawing parallels between his Holocaust film and the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.
“A friend wrote me, after seeing the film the other day, that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we chose not to look behind,” Wilson said.
“Those walls aren’t new from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen,” he continued, with the room breaking into applause, “in the same way think about innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel.”
Of the 253 hostages seized when thousands of Hamas terrorists slaughtered around 1,200 people, it’s believed that 132 are still in captivity after a weeklong truce in late November saw the release of 105 people.
Swathes of the LAPD’s 9,000 officers are expected to be working in conjunction with federal agencies as the stars prepare for their biggest night of the year.
Gaza’s health ministry said at the end of last month that the number of Palestinians killed in the war has surpassed 30,000.
This post was originally posted by NYPost
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