Biography | Lionel Richie — The Pavilion Where Say You Say Me Took the Oscar

On 24 March 1986 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Best Original Song to Lionel Richie for Say You, Say Me, written for the film White Nights.

The ceremony was in this hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at 135 North Grand Avenue, which had housed the Oscars for most years since 1969.

Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor opened the envelope.

The same song had already taken the Golden Globe.

Richie had been nominated in the category before, in 1982, for the duet Endless Love with Diana Ross.

That night he was also nominated, as co-writer with Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton, for Miss Celie's Blues from The Color Purple. That one lost.

The win closed a run that had begun with Commodores ballads and run through Can't Slow Down and the charity single of the year before.

He then stepped back from the tour-and-album cycle for several years.

The Pavilion still works as an opera house. The Oscars left it for good after 1999.

A visitor now walks into a Music Center courtyard, not a red-carpet set.

Welton Becket and Associates designed the building. It opened to the public in 1964.

Photo: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, public domain and CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons