“No sovereign, no court,” sighed Henry James when lamenting America’s cultural poverty, “no church, no clergy”. To make up for those deficiencies, his compatriots invented the movies, manufacturing a pantheon of virile gods and nubile goddesses who outshone the chinless toffs admired by James. The sacred totem of this new religion was modelled on the chivalry that America officially rejected: the Academy Award takes the form of a sword-bearing crusader, proudly erect on a pedestal representing a reel of film. But the figure’s knightly pretence was immediately undercut by a fond, familiar nickname: when an Academy employee saw the first gold-plated statuette in 1931, she said it resembled her Uncle Oscar.

At the ceremony in 1960, the big victor was Ben-Hur, in which Charlton Heston’s charioteer is as rigidly pious as the Oscar that he inevitably won.

Dennis Stock shrewdly waited until the deities had departed, leaving behind the evidence of their self-indulgence: crumpled napkins, guttering candles, stubbed-out cigarettes and a bucket of sloppy ice – the detritus of a cocktail party, since, back then, before the proceedings were tidied up for television, the nominees could puff and tipple throughout the nerve-racking ordeal. Then, after the revels, Stock’s camera told an indiscreet truth about the event and the art it celebrates. Despite his polished sheen, this crusader has not routed the pagans. Stranded among the empties, he surveys an unholy land that could be the home turf of the movies – a tabletop that is the messy playground of our appetites and dreams.