Obsessed with the movies, Stockstill was especially interested in Oscar Award trivia. By 1982 he had more than 10,000 index cards cataloging Oscar data, and applied at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an assistant librarian. “It’s the one job in the world that I wanted to get,” he once said.
They hired him, and the Academy bought its first computer so his data could be digitized. Within a year, Stockstill was the Academy’s official historian, and he made his data base available on the Internet. (The site is now the main one for the Academy.) One of his job perks: guarding the Oscar statuettes at the annual award shows; he was the one who handed them to the presenters. Stockstill, who long suffered from heart disease, recently had a heart-liver-kidney transplant. Complications after the surgery killed him on May 24. He was 57.