Since 2001, the Academy Awards ceremony has had a permanent home in The Kodak Theatre, but there’s long been a chance that was going to change, because reports were going around that the Academy wasn’t going to automatically renew their lease with the theater come 2013, and were looking to take the Oscars elsewhere. Early reports had the Nokia Theatre being a likely choice for a replacement, as they offered more room to maneuver, more modern facilities, and a competitive price on the lease. Today all of that talk was put to rest, however, as it was announced that the Academy Awards would be remaining in its current home, but would soon be doing some slight redecorating. Dolby Laboratories Inc. announced via press release that the Academy has signed a new 20 year lease to keep the Oscars at the Kodak Theatre, which will now be going by the name The Dolby Theatre. You see, that’s why Dolby Laboratories is doing the announcing and not Kodak or CIM, the group who actually own the building; going forward, they’re going to be using the Awards to get their technology some big-time publicity.

The Sound Works Collection’s obsession with movie sound continues. This time the cool content they’re bringing to us is a series of videos that take a look at Dolby’s new sound platform, Dolby Atmos, which intends on taking theater surround sound to a new, more immersive level. The reason this new way of developing movie sound is different from everything that comes before it is that it’s not so much concerned with speaker configurations and mixing the sound in a movie to hit certain clusters of speakers in a room. Instead, it views the soundscape a movie is creating as a three-dimensional plane of existence, like the Danger Room or the Holodeck, and it views the sounds in a movie as “objects” that are traveling around said plane. As the objects move around in this imaginary area, the sounds that they make come through a theater’s speakers individually, instead of in clusters.