LOS ANGELES - On a visit to the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, I realized something about my home town. Los Angeles is binging on museums. In 10 years, $2 billion (CAD) will have been spent on five world-class museums in two blocks of the city’s Miracle Mile.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Peterson Automotive Museum, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the La Brea Tar Pits and George C. Page Museum and the Craft Contemporary.
All the museums are open, even as some, like LACMA undergo complex renovations that could take until 2024.

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

Having worked in the entertainment business for over 30 years, I was excited to visit the Academy Museum.
Growing up watching The Wizard of Oz, it was a rare treat to be close to Judy Garland’s ruby red slippers. Having been scared-to-death by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, it was fun to see “Bruce,” the menacing mechanical shark. No longer a threat in the water, Bruce was suspended from the ceiling, safely out-of-reach.
Showing how individuals can change the medium, the museum puts spotlights on notable filmmakers, like the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, the Colombian director Patricia Cardoso and Hong Kong actor Bruce Lee.
If you ever wondered how movies are made, exhibits explain the skills required to make a film. Actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, editors, cinematographers, composers, costume designers and so many others have to work together. The list of artists is long, the result magical.
At the museum’s Identity Gallery, you can stand close enough to touch (but don’t) clothing worn by actors in iconic films. I was mesmerized by Julian Day’s colourful, fantastical “Winged Devil” costume worn by Aaron Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman.
Have you ever dreamed of winning an Oscar. Now you can at the Oscars Experience, even if it’s only make-believe.

La Brea Tar Pits and Museum

The Tar Pits hide a deadly secret.
When I was growing up, there weren’t fences. I used to race across the tar pits. Happily, I never got stuck, but thousands of dire wolves, mammoths, sabre toothed cats and countless other creatures great and small that lived during the Last Ice Age weren’t so lucky.     
As thirsty animals came for a drink, they became trapped in the asphalt and disappeared into the goo. Animal after animal. Year after year. Until a jumble of animals and plants were pressed together in a geologic scrapbook kept by Mother Nature.
An active research site, at the George C. Page Museum’s glass-enclosed Fossil Lab, you can watch palaeontologists carefully uncover bones and bits of life from as long ago as 50,000 years. Skeletal remains recovered from the Tar Pits are on display in galleries with towering mammoths and packs of fierce-looking dire wolves.
For a separate admission, I watched the 25-minute 3-D “Titans of the Ice Age” to encounter some of Earth’s most awe-inspiring extinct mammals, including giant sloths and iconic mammoths.

Petersen Automotive Museum

Sleek as a custom Ferrari, painted bright red with bands of undulating silver, the Petersen Automotive Museum seems to ripple in the wind as if the entire building were speeding on a race track.
More than 300 cars are on display in a museum created for automobile lovers. Ranging from the sublime, the exotic, the antique, the extreme to the familiar, there are cars used by astronauts, presidents and movie stars. In “Bond in Motion,” I saw vehicles that had their moments of fame in the Bond films.
After I explored the museum’s above-ground exhibits, I took a 90 minute guided tour of the basement vault. Steven Milner led a fun, fact-filled trip-through-time to see boxy Model Ts, a Corvette Sting Ray, super cars, stock cars, LoRiders, a 10,140ps Funny Car, cars designed for movies and even a Popemobile.  
Painted every colour of the rainbow, outfitted with sleek leather or floral upholstery, two-door, four-door, convertible or hardtop, name a car from any time-period and it is probably on display at the Petersen in all its showroom-polished glory. If you love cars, you will be in heaven at the Petersen.

LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

My visits to LACMA always begin outside. At the Wilshire entrance, Chris Burden’s “Urban Lights,” with its 202 antique lampposts is a favourite selfie-Instagram spot. On the back of the museum, I can’t resist walking underneath the magic-trick called “Levitated Mass.” Over a walkway that leads nowhere, Michael Heizer suspended 308-tonnes of Diorite granite on tiny steel shelves.
To reach the third level of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), I ride the escalator, framed by bright red steel girders and spindly palm trees. A quiet refuge from the busy mid-city traffic outside, the spacious, skylight-bright galleries are a happy home for works by Matisse, Picasso, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Rothko, Stella, Warhol, Ruscha and other great modern artists.
Across the walkway, the Resnick Pavilion emphasizes the contemporary. When I visited, there were six exhibits of great variety. One gallery featured art by Chinese artists, notably, Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads.” Another, my favourite, was “Black American Portraits,” with photographs, sculptures and paintings of African-American men, women and children.

Craft Contemporary

Executive Director Suzanne Isken leads me upstairs to see Moffat Takadiwa’s “Witchcraft: Rethinking Power.” Even wearing masks, I know she’s smiling. She likes this exhibit. Using found objects like toothpaste tubes and electrical wires, Takadiwa creates art out of the discarded. For Isken, Takadiwa’s colourful sculptures and wall hangings are exactly the kind of work Craft Contemporary celebrates: well-made, imaginative crafts.
For the Spring, she recommended “heaven is a muddy riverbed” by Diedrick Brackens who combines poetry and tapestries to create beautifully unique weavings and Jaishri Abichandani’s “Flower-Headed Children” whose fantastical epoxy-clay-mixed-media sculptures celebrate women.
Often a single artist is showcased on each of the museum’s three floors. Group shows might focus on a material like clay, a craft like quilting or a seasonal celebration like the December Holiday Marketplace. Handcraft workshops, mentored by professional artists, are also offered so museum goers can appreciate the art-of-the-craft and become artists themselves.