It’s getting close to that time again.  The Oscars are nearly upon us and you can’t spit in Hollywood these days without hitting an awards show or two.  So it got me thinking.  Just how much does that red carpet weigh?  Yup, that’s the kind of stuff I think about these days.  So I set out on a mission to find out.

First I had to figure out how big the Oscars red carpet is.  The answer is, it’s HUGE!  Check out this photo from Google maps:

That’s a loooong walk in 4-inch heels.  My research tells me that the Oscars red carpet which takes a large chunk of Hollywood Boulevard measures 33 feet wide and over 500 feet long!  That’s 16,500 square feet of carpet!  Apparently the rental cost on this much red carpet could range between $20,000 and $30,000 once service and maintenance fees are taken into account.  (That’s not counting the cleaning bill.  And somehow I don’t think renting a Rug Doctor machine from the local grocery store is gonna cut it.)

Estimates for the weight of carpet are all over the map.  But the most consistent guess I saw puts the weight at about 5 pounds per square yard.  So let’s do the math:

Rug Area (in feet) 16,500

Rug Area (in yards) 1,834

Carpet Weight (in pounds) 9,170

Conclusion while many of the starlets on it may not, the red carpet at the Oscars weighs more than me.

P.S. Be sure to enter your miles or minutes at Fit Fatties Across America before noon today in order to count towards this week’s goals.  Let’s get out of Colorado people!

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