An L.A. state of mind for Oscar?

Here in L.A., we feel a special bond with the Oscars. And who can blame us for imagining ourselves gliding down the red carpet when this season rolls around?

With the Academy Awards due on Sunday, we thought we’d take a look back at how Los Angeles County fared, show-biz wise, this season – and, just for fun, at how much of the spotlight we got.

So ten films have been nominated for Best Picture. Of those, can you guess how many were shot on location in L.A.?

Well, not counting scenes that were shot at studios here, there were four, says Philip Sokoloski, communications director of FilmL.A., the nonprofit that coordinates film permits throughout the city and county.

Best Los Angeles County Location in a Best Picture

“The Kids Are All Right,” the romantic comedy about a lesbian couple, their children, and the children’s biological father, had a lot of scenes shot in and around L.A. The father’s house is a real house in Echo Park. Scenes in which the daughter goes to college are shot in Eagle Rock on the Occidental College campus. Permits for other location shoots include the Huron Substation in Cypress Park and the Penmar Recreation Center in Venice.

“The Fighter,” David O. Russell’s New England boxing movie, is set in Massachusetts and was largely shot there. But the permits indicate that several scenes were shot locally. One cites the Pan Pacific Warehouse in L.A.’s Downtown loft district; another gives the address of BASF Corp., an industrial building downtown that’s often used as a stand-in for boxing gyms.

“The Social Network”—which shot at such L.A. landmarks as the Hancock Memorial Museum on the USC campus, the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and the old Los Angeles Stock Exchange building for its story of the founding of Facebook—also filmed some of its Silicon Valley scenes at a private home in Altadena on Mendocino Street, records show.

And then there’s “Inception,” which was all over L.A., from Berth 200H of the Port of Los Angeles to a beach in Palos Verdes. But we like to think the star was the county’s own Music Center, where, on a day in mid-October, the backdrop for the futuristic dream movie was the Ahmanson Theatre.

Best Performance in an Economic Indicator

Meanwhile, the good news, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, is that the entertainment industry rebounded last year from a wrenching 2009 throughout Los Angeles County, with about 16,500 more Hollywood jobs and “more motion pictures, television pilots and shows and commercials being filmed.”

More on-location filming, too. FilmL.A. recorded a 15% increase in film permits last year. The bad news, as Southern California grapples with a struggling economy and runaway production, is that feature production was less than half of what it was in the mid-1990s. But new state tax credits made a big difference – in fact, FilmL.A. found, they were responsible in 2010 for more than a quarter of L.A.’s local feature film production. And the fourth quarter was especially good.

Posted 2/24/11