It’s Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, and you’re trapped in an Escalade, inching through traffic on your way to the Oscars, glamorously attired for the celebration but wishing you felt a little more festive. Instead, you’re monitoring the scene outside your window with a mounting sense of dread.
At first, it’s the long stretches of barricades and metal fencing lining Hollywood Boulevard as traffic funnels toward the Dolby Theatre. But before you even glimpse the venue, you notice the heightened security. Officers are everywhere — there are patrol cars on every corner — and more than 1,000 law enforcement personnel have been deployed in the area as part of an unprecedented security operation for this year’s Oscar ceremony.
Traffic slows again, so you glance up and spot silhouettes on rooftops — they are SWAT teams posted on nearby buildings. The checkpoint ahead crawls forward as officers slide mirrors beneath cars and canines weave through the line, sniffing for explosives.
“Windows down. Pop the trunk,” you hear and comply. The line moves about an inch every five minutes.
This is what the Oscars look like in the age of the Iran war. Security at the ceremony has always been formidable. But this year, in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s event, federal authorities issued a memo warning of a possible retaliatory threat against the West Coast — particularly California — tied to escalating U.S.-Israel-Iran tensions.
Officials acknowledged no verified intelligence of a specific plot. But with American forces actively engaged in a conflict that has made high-profile domestic targets a symbolic priority for Iranian-aligned actors, law enforcement wasn’t taking chances. The result is the most security-intensive Academy Awards in memory — a fortress of concentric rings, AI surveillance, FBI intelligence gathering and rooftop snipers wrapped around Hollywood’s biggest night.
Limousines and SUVs now stretch for blocks, all carrying guests to the same highly anticipated event. But every vehicle is stuck in the same position — boxed in by barricades, hemmed in by concrete, unable to turn around.
There’s precedent for this kind of gridlock. In 2023, protesters flooded nearby streets and surrounded vehicles heading toward the Oscars, bringing arrivals ahead of the show’s start time to a halt. Several individuals hurled trash and objects at the waiting cars; otherwise, the demonstration largely remained peaceful. This year, though, the stakes are different. Trapped in a slow-moving convoy of high-profile passengers, hemmed in and unable to move, it’s hard not to let your mind wander somewhere darker — toward the footage of motorists in Israel, trapped in gridlock while trying to flee the Nova Music Festival massacre during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
A crowd in the street. Cars frozen in place.
“Every year, we monitor what’s going on in the world,” Raj Kapoor, an executive producer of the Academy Awards, said at a March 11 press conference aimed at tamping down security concerns. “We have the support of the FBI and the LAPD, and it’s a close collaboration. This show has to run like clockwork. But we want everybody — attendees, viewers, even fans standing outside the barricades — to feel safe, protected and welcome.”
This year, the security perimeter around the Dolby Theatre stretches roughly one mile. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is actively monitoring social media as it gathers and analyzes intelligence in real time. At street level, the LAPD has deployed SWAT teams, a bomb squad and snipers — plus a traffic management strategy specifically designed to prevent vehicles from approaching the theater in a straight line.
“In Los Angeles, we use rings of security to harden the target,” LAPD chief Jim McDonnell said this week. “Intelligence is the foundational factor — preventing something from happening before it does.”
The Dolby sits inside Ovation Hollywood, a shopping complex where every retail tenant is shuttered and cleared out for the week, allowing the complex to be locked down well in advance.
This year, advances in AI are allowing technology to do much of the work. Ryan Schonfeld, CEO of AI security platform HiveWatch, says the most effective plans at events like the Oscars combine the visible — officers, barriers, checkpoints — with the less obvious. “Hidden security can be more operationally impactful, while visible security serves as a stronger deterrent,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Hidden measures often include technology, plainclothes personnel and subtle physical design choices.”
Matt Sailor, CEO of surveillance firm IC Realtime and a 20-year veteran of the field, pointed to behavioral analytics as a rapidly advancing tool: AI-powered cameras that can detect the visual signature of a drawn weapon, flag suspicious movement within dense crowds and identify individuals on pre-loaded watchlists — those with histories of stalking, harassment or threatening online behavior — in real time.
“Instead of relying solely on manual spotting, AI-enabled cameras scan the crowd continuously,” Sailor said. “This turns a passive video feed into an active defensive layer.”
But for all of it — the rings, the snipers, the AI cameras, the bomb-sniffing dogs — one threat remains stubbornly hard to control: the insider.
Will Smith’s onstage slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars is the obvious example. Smith was credentialed, expected and cleared through every layer of security. And yet.
“The convergence of sophisticated cyberattacks and localized acts of violence represents an increased risk profile that planners are focused on right now,” Schonfeld said. “And that threat environment isn’t going away.”
The cars inch forward. The dogs circle the line. The silhouettes are holding their positions on the rooftops.
You make it through the checkpoint. You’re in.
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