Oscar Wars

America has no royalty, the book begins, but it does have the Academy Awards. For nine decades, glamorous starlets, debonair leading men and producers with dollar signs in their eyes have chased the Oscar. The awards started in 1929 as an industry banquet and grew into a revered ceremony with red carpets, sealed envelopes and golden statuettes. Behind the pageantry, the Oscars are a battlefield on which the history of Hollywood, and of America, plays out in dramas large and small.

In Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman traces the sprawling history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas, some famous and some never told before, that have unfolded both on stage and behind the cameras. Unlike other books on the subject, each chapter focuses closely on one year, one conflict or even one category to show a larger story of cultural change, from Louis B. Mayer to Moonlight. Schulman looks at how the path down the red carpet crosses contested ground, and why the winners are not always as clear as the names read from the envelopes. Caught in the crossfire are the people themselves, with their thwarted ambitions, artistic epiphanies, messy collaborations and dreams fulfilled or dashed.

The cast includes some of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, past and present, along with outsiders who stormed the gates. Each tale marks a turning point for the Academy, for the movies or for the culture at large.

Schulman is a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.