9 things to know before you visit the Academy Museum

When the museum first opened, a timed ticket was a must (fueled at least in part by the popularity of the Hayao Miyazaki retrospective at the time). Now that it’s a few years old, timed tickets are no longer required but they’re still helpful to have—especially on busy weekends if you want to make sure you have a specific time slot secured.

Regardless, a ticket runs $25 for adults (and admission is free for those 17 and under). Special exhibitions are included in the cost, too.

You don’t need a ticket at all if you just want to pop into the gift shop or explore the lobby’s free Spielberg Family Gallery—but that small space of TVs playing some classic film clips isn’t really worth the trip alone.

When you’re booking your tickets, you’ll have the option to add on access to the Oscars Experience. Consider this the made-for-Instagram experience at the museum, with reservations available every 15 minutes.

The Oscars Experience lets you step up to a podium with bright lights and a virtual crowd in your face as your accept your award: an unengraved Oscar, identical to the ones given out during the Academy Awards, that you can pick up (but not keep). You’re only inside for a few seconds, and you’ll be emailed a personalized, polished video of your award acceptance.

It’s well put together, but remarkably expensive for just how brief it is; only plunk down the extra $10 (a slight discount over its initial rate of $15) if being able to say “I held an Oscar” is a must.

The museum’s footprint might not seem massive at first: The core “Stories of Cinema” collection is spread across two floors, with a third mostly dedicated to a special exhibition space. And we suppose that if you only wanted to see the highlights (like the shark from Jaws and a bunch of other recognizable objects) that you could breeze through the whole thing pretty quickly.

But we spent nearly three hours exploring the galleries during our first visit and still felt like we didn’t soak everything in. The Academy Museum is dense: Props, scripts and photos cover every wall, and you’ll be rewarded with snippets of cinematic history if you stop to read each one. And that’s in addition to all of the video clips looping through the museum: a wraparound montage of sci-fi scenes, memorable moments from Pedro Almodóvar films, a behind-the-scenes video from The Dark Crystal, screen tests, interviews—you get the idea.

Well, you’d kind of expect that a movie museum would have a movie theater, right? The Academy Museum actually has two of them: The 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater (that’s inside of the glassy soap bubble-like structure that anchors the instutition), and the 288-seat Ted Mann Theater, which sits on the lower floor.

You’ll typically find one or two screenings downstairs during the day, and then an evening one in the main theater—both typically for $10, with the exception of some special events. The image quality in both theaters is spectacular, with a mix of both film and digital projectors in each. (Psst: If you have an L.A. Library Card, you can grab tickets to select screenings for free.)

The Academy Museum’s displays aren’t nearly as short-lived as an average art museum, but the institution absolutely does rotate its objects and gallery focuses at varying rates.

The short version: Special exhibitions are changed out once or twice a year, while smaller showcases on specific figures in film tend to last for a couple of years. Props and costumes throughout the rest of the museum are changed at a much quicker rate.

The special exhibitions on the fourth floor (which have included Hayao Miyazaki, Black cinema and John Waters) run for roughly six months to nearly a year.

The second floor “Significant Movies and Moviemakers” section keeps its displays on view for a considerably longer amount of time. These galleries opened in the fall of 2021 with showcases on Citizen Kane, Real Women Have Curves, Emmanuel Lubezki, Thelma Schoonmaker and Oscar Micheaux. In early 2023, they gave way to similar showcases on Casablanca, Boyz n the Hood, documentarian Lourdes Portillo and collaborations between production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer—all of which will be on view until early 2026.

The nearby moviemaking and director spotlights have slightly shorter runs: After year-long dives into The Wizard of Oz and Spike Lee, those galleries are now dedicated to The Godfather and filmmaker Agnès Varda for a roughly two-year run that wraps up in early 2025. (That means Dorothy’s ruby slippers are no longer on view.)

The third floor’s “Inventing Worlds and Characters” gallery, which features familiar sci-fi and fantasy costumes and prosthetics, tends to rotate its selections occasionally and only a piece or two at a time. So you won’t find E.T. there at the moment, but the gallery has regularly included C-3PO from Star Wars, Okoye from Black Panther and the Amphibian Man from The Shape of Water, while most recently we spotted Frank from Donnie Darko along with the eponymous Edward Scissorhands.

The costume gallery swaps out its selections by far more frequently and completely than any other space in the museum. In fact, we’ve spotted something new here on just about every one of our half-dozen visits in the two years since opening; on our most recent trip, we saw Laura Dern’s Jurassic Park outfit, Austin Butler’s Elvis getup and Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice wig.

Given that this is a movie museum in L.A., you might expect a certain type of Hollywood-centric narrative: Major studios birthed blockbusters and the best ones were bestowed with Oscars. But that’s absolutely not the case here.

Instead, the Academy Museum’s core exhibition recognizes that there are many stories (plural) that’ve pushed cinema forward, and it’s not shy about the ones that’ve held it back, either. In the museum’s initial gallery selections, Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz were celebrated as cornerstones, but so too were the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee and the early-20th-century films of Oscar Micheaux, the first Black feature filmmaker. 

It’s also not afraid to call out where the industry (and yes, that includes the Academy) could’ve done better: Tins of Max Factor Pan-Cake makeup confront blackface in the costume and makeup gallery, a hallway of industry challenges acknowledges labor disputes and the Me Too movement, the script section examines the representation of Native voices, and the animation gallery alone has confronted issues like minstrelsy, cultural appropriation and the gender pay gap.

All that said, L.A. does have a few locally-focused moments in the museum. One of the first galleries explores Boyz N the Hood’s depiction of Black culture in South L.A. and includes some on-site production photos. A corner of the second floor features photos of the museum’s main building back when it was the May Company department store, while the lounge near the lower level theater is lined with glitzy black-and-white photos from old premieres at movie palaces around L.A.

Sometimes, too, it’s just a matter of knowing the backstory of a piece in the collection (like a restored shark from Jaws that sat in a junkyard in the Valley for decades) or the very-L.A. film it comes from (the Dude’s robe from The Big Lebowski was initially on display). 

If you think it’s hard to pass up keepsakes and decor with Frida or Basquiat in a typical museum shop, wait until you walk into one with Totoro on everything. You’re bound to find something in the store you can’t resist, whether it tugs at childhood nostalgia (a ruby slipper bag) or your inner cinephile (Almodóvar espresso maker earrings).

You’ll find entire sections of the store dedicated to current exhibitions, plus some merch inspired by the museum itself and the Oscars. There’s even a nook with an Amoeba-curated vinyl collection.

The Academy Museum comes from the people who hand out awards for excellence in cinema and put on a glamorous red carpet event, and the museum makes more sense aesthetically when you realize it has both of those personalities baked in.

On the one hand, there’s the archivist, a neat and meticulously assembled vault of movie ephemera that recognizes all-time classics and overlooked greats.

On the other, there’s the party planner: the cavernous lobby turns into a cocktail lounge for special events, the fifth-floor terrace and its adjoining tea room are practically engineered for galas, and there’s a red carpet built right into the walkway to the main theater.

That also means you might occasionally find the top-floor terrace closed for a private event. Does that significantly shortchange your visit? Not at all. But if you’re dead set on those impressive views it’s just something to keep in mind.