The first Academy Awards in 1929 was a $5 private dinner for about 270 people at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, with a 15-minute presentation and zero suspense, since the winners had been announced three months earlier. This deep dive decodes how that intimate industry gathering became a billion-dollar, heavily audited institution. It starts with the statuette itself: Cedric Gibbons' art deco knight sculpted by George Stanley, standing on a film reel with five spokes for the original branches, made of bronze, then Britannia metal, then painted plaster during World War II, and since 2016 cast from a 3D scan of a 1929 original. It also weighs competing claims about the name Oscar, from Bette Davis and Margaret Herrick to the archival case for secretary Eleanor Lilleberg.

The episode explains how the Los Angeles Times publishing winners before ...