Before the Academy Award became that locked down, tracked and sacred cultural trophy, it was just a thing. Honorific. Symbolic. Sometimes achingly fragile. Perhaps no lost Oscar underscores this better than Hattie McDaniel's Missing Oscar. Gone With the Wind's Oscar plaque vanished without a trace. It was not the iconic golden statuette we know and love now, but the precursor plaques awarded to supporting actors (and actresses) during that period in time. It was history being made...and then it went mysteriously missing.

Oscar. The Academy Award. By any name, it inspires the same hush of reverence. For those fortunate enough to receive one—deserved or not—it represents the brass ring of Hollywood achievement, the ultimate benediction bestowed by one’s peers. Such was the moment for Margaret O’Brien, an eight-year-old girl widely regarded then—and now—as one of the most gifted child performers in screen history.

Time, fame, and money have always traveled lightly in Hollywood, and few lives illustrate that cruel arithmetic more poignantly than that of Pierre Collings, a gifted screenwriter who reached the industry’s highest summit only to disappear almost immediately into obscurity and poverty.

This morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards, and the results sparked immediate buzz across Hollywood and around the world. At the center of the conversation is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a bold period supernatural film that has just rewritten Oscar history: with 16 nominations—more than any film ever—it surpasses the longstanding record shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land and positions itself as the dominant contender in this year’s race.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in the late 1920s—at the exact second, some might say—that Hollywood figured out it needed more than glitz and glamour to survive. The film industry was already a national juggernaut in the making, but it was also a rickety workplace rife with fractious crafts, burgeoning unions, and studios scrambling to control production, wages, and image. Out of that pressure cooker emerged an idea that would prove both utilitarian and symbolic: Create an organization that could corral the industry's top talent under one roof, smooth labor friction, inculcate "standards" of craft and—crucially—give motion pictures the kind of institutional prestige that was enjoyed by older arts.