I am part of the repertory cinema scene in Los Angeles, that lonely confederacy of men in graphic tees, paying for parking just to watch movies you could easily rent on Amazon. So I speak from both authority and trial and error when I say the David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, and kitty-corner from where Biggie Smalls was gunned down in the street, is the finest in the city. Everything is red and blush and decadent, like the embrace of a Borgia cardinal. The screen spans your peripheral vision, veiled by a motorized curtain that is raised and dropped with reckless abandon, proving to us some inscrutable point. The splendor encourages self-governance: There’s no need for an usher to police phone use because you’d feel sacrilegious even in the attempt.

The trappings are all well and good, but I’ve been to stickier cinemas for worse films. What I’m here for are the epics. I am here watching my second Charlton Heston film in as many weeks. Every Sunday, the museum screens a film as part of its Oscar series, these past two weeks honoring the last hurrah of epics in Hollywood. The week prior was Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, followed the next Sunday by William Wyler’s Ben-Hur. Watching both 200-plus-minute films and comparing them in the mind to today’s fare, you wonder just how DeMille commandeered virtually the entire population of a neighboring suburb for the crowd scenes, and try not to wonder how many horses the Ben-Hur chariot race sent to the great glue factory in the sky.