Actress Hattie McDaniel, left, appears with actress Fay Bainter, right, the night McDaniel won best supporting actress for her role in the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” in Los Angeles on Feb. 29, 1940. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has created a replacement of McDaniel’s Academy Award plaque that it is gifting to Howard University.

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Actress Hattie McDaniel, left, appears with actress Fay Bainter, right, the night McDaniel won best supporting actress for her role in the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” in Los Angeles on Feb. 29, 1940. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has created a replacement of McDaniel’s Academy Award plaque that it is gifting to Howard University.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is sending Howard University a replacement Oscar for the groundbreaking actress Hattie McDaniel, whose original award has been missing for at least 50 years.

McDaniel was the first Black person to be nominated for and win an Oscar for her supporting role as Mammy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind.

She went on to act in more than 300 movies, and shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1952, she asked that the Oscar be moved from her home to Howard University in Washington.

But the plaque, which preceded the gold statuettes and was given to supporting winners from 1936 to 1942, suddenly disappeared from the school’s fine arts building.

“Hattie McDaniel was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her,” Academy Museum Director Jacqueline Stewart and Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in a Tuesday statement. “We are thrilled to present a replacement of Hattie McDaniel’s Academy Award to Howard University.”

Thomas Battle, the former director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard, told NPR in 2009 that he believes the award went missing in the late 1960s or early 1970s, possibly during a period of student unrest.

“But unfortunately all of the principals who would have been involved at the university at that time — administrators and others — are no longer with us, and we have not been able to get the kind of direct information that we would like to be able to pursue this investigation further.”

Denise Randle, who tracked the university’s inventory of artifacts beginning in 1972, first said she thought it was thrown away. Then, she thought it must have been misplaced. Actress Karla Burns, who portrayed McDaniel in the one-woman show Hi-Hat, thought the plaque was stolen.

Nevertheless, the new, gifted plaque will be housed in Howard’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and be accompanied by a ceremony on Oct. 1, titled “Hattie’s Come Home,” honoring McDaniel’s life and career.

“When I was a student in the College of Fine Arts at Howard University, in what was then called the Department of Drama, I would often sit and gaze in wonder at the Academy Award that had been presented to Ms. Hattie McDaniel,” said Phylicia Rashad, the dean of the fine arts school and a Tony Award-winning actress. “I am overjoyed that this Academy Award is returning to what is now the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University.”

Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator.

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Madeleine Yuna Voyles plays Alphie, a pensive young robot child in The Creator.

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The use of AI in Hollywood has been one of the most contentious issues in the writers and actors strikes, and the industry’s anxiety about the subject isn’t going away anytime soon. Some of that anxiety has already started to register on-screen. A mysterious robotic entity was the big villain in the most recent Mission: Impossible film, and AI is also central to the ambitious but muddled new science-fiction drama The Creator.

Set decades into the future, the movie begins with a prologue charting the rise of artificial intelligence. Here it’s represented as a race of humanoid robots that in time become powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon and wipe out the entire city of Los Angeles.

As a longtime LA resident who’s seen his city destroyed in countless films before this one, I couldn’t help but watch this latest cataclysm with a chuckle and a shrug. It’s just part of the setup in a story that patches together numerous ideas from earlier, better movies. After the destruction of LA, we learn, the U.S. declared war on AI and hunted the robots to near-extinction; the few that still remain are hiding out in what is now known as New Asia.

The director Gareth Edwards, who wrote the script with Chris Weitz, has cited Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now as major influences. And indeed, there’s something queasy and heavy-handed about the way Edwards evokes the Vietnam War with images of American soldiers terrorizing the poor Asian villagers whom they suspect of sheltering robots.

John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative.

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John David Washington plays Joshua Taylor, a world-weary ex-special-forces operative.

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The protagonist is a world-weary ex-special-forces operative named Joshua Taylor, played by John David Washington. He’s reluctantly joined the mission to help destroy an AI superweapon said to be capable of wiping out humanity for good. Amid the battle that ensues, Joshua manages to track down the weapon, which — in a twist that echoes earlier sci-fi classics like Akira and A.I. — turns out to be a pensive young robot child, played by the excellent newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles.

Joshua’s superior, played by Allison Janney, tells him to kill the robot child, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes rogue and on the run with the child, whom he calls Alpha, or Alphie. Washington doesn’t have much range or screen presence, but he and Voyles do generate enough chemistry to make you forget you’re watching yet another man tag-teaming with a young girl — a trope familiar from movies as different as Paper Moon and Léon: The Professional.

Joshua’s betrayal is partly motivated by his grief over his long-lost love, a human woman named Maya who allied herself with the robots; she’s played by an underused Gemma Chan. One of the more bothersome aspects of The Creator is the way it reflexively equates Asians with advanced technology; it’s the latest troubling example of “techno-orientalism,” a cultural concept that has spurred a million Blade Runner term papers.

In recycling so many spare parts, Edwards, best known for directing the Star Wars prequel Rogue One, is clearly trying to tap into our memories of great Hollywood spectacles past. To his credit, he wants to give us the kind of philosophically weighty, visually immersive science-fiction blockbuster that the studios rarely attempt anymore. The most impressive aspect of The Creator is its world building; much of the movie was shot on location in different Asian countries, and its mix of real places and futuristic design elements feels more plausible and grounded than it would have if it had been rendered exclusively in CGI.

But even the most strikingly beautiful images — like the one of high-tech laser beams shimmering over a beach at sunset — are tethered to a story and characters that never take on a life of their own. Not even the great Ken Watanabe can breathe much life into his role as a stern robo-warrior who does his part to help Joshua and Alphie on their journey.

In the end, Edwards mounts a sincere but soggy plea for human-robot harmony, arguing that AI isn’t quite the malicious threat it might seem. That’s a sweet enough sentiment, though it’s also one of many reasons I left The Creator asking myself: Did an AI write this?