“Sometimes they don’t notice them and sometimes they kind of gasp and they’re stuttering, ‘is that an Oscar?’ Then I say, ‘now you’ve seen it, you’ve got to make a wish’. You’ve no idea how many wishes have been made on my Oscars,” she says.

“And they always take it like they’re holding the Virgin Mary or something. They close their eyes and they make a wish and it’s quite interesting.”

Kildare-born Burke, who emigrated to Canada in the late 1970s before moving to LA, has been nominated for an Academy Award six times. She won her first in 1983 for the makeup she created for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s drama Quest for Fire.

The ceremony was very different then, she notes, with fewer nominees and no social media hype. The category for Best Makeup (now Best Makeup and Hairstyling) had only been created two years previously, and this was long before the rise of professional makeup artistry schools.

Acknowledging a touch of imposter syndrome, Burke says she wondered if her win was a “fluke”. When she won her second Academy Award in 1993 for her work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she felt “kind of vindicated”.

“But after that it became more difficult because the field began to get quite flooded with a lot of great makeup artists,” she says. “Suddenly our field was becoming a field of interest and everyone wanted to be special effects makeup artists.”

Winning an Academy Award is a great honour says Burke, who’s quick to acknowledge the “team effort” of everyone involved in the films for which she was nominated.

And yet, after winning each of her Oscars, she observed a curious phenomenon. The award didn’t instantly lead to more opportunities. On the contrary, many former clients assumed she was unavailable for work.

“I remember a producer saying to me, ‘now that you’ve won an Oscar, I don’t know if we can afford you’. And I was saying, ‘No, no, my fee is still the same. Nothing’s changed, I still want to work for you.’ And I had to make sure people understood that.

“There is kind of a stillness and a silence and you’re thinking, ‘gosh, I was expecting the phone to be ringing’. I think the only thing you can do is go back to your roots and do your normal cold calling or whatever you did to get work. Keep connecting and letting people know that you’re around.

“And also, keep being creative and producing more and more things yourself to show your creativity hasn’t dried up and you’re not just going to sit back and chew the cud now that you’ve won.”​

Markéta Irglová, who with Glen Hansard won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008 for ‘Falling Slowly’ from Once, can relate.

“It can do a little damage in that people feel wary to reach out because it might be pointless to collaborate with someone who has won an Oscar,” she tells me.

“I have experienced that, or thought that, because in fact I don’t get approached by a lot of people for collaboration. Most of the time it is me approaching others that I feel inspired by and respect.”

There is occasional talk in Hollywood about the ‘curse’ of the Oscars — where a winner’s career, instead of hitting the stratosphere, actually goes the opposite direction. But Irglová certainly doesn’t regret winning the award, nor is she complaining about its impact on her career.

She’s “eternally grateful” for her Oscar, she adds, and can still vividly remember the day she heard they were nominated.

“Glen and I were in my parents’ house, in the living room, checking in on the computer, when we got the news. Glen was overjoyed when he saw it and I had this feeling of it not really computing.

“I was obviously happy but it was so surreal and so far outside of any dreams I had, that I was amazed. I felt happy for Glen because I knew how much it meant to him. As surreal as it was for me, for him it was the answer to long-term dreams.”

Irglová was just 19 years old when she arrived in Los Angeles to attend the 80th Academy Awards, and totally unacquainted with the hype surrounding the awards ceremony.

A “guardian angel”, who she doesn’t name, recognised how wide-eyed she was.

“She was part of the industry in Hollywood but was also just very human about the whole experience. She felt sympathy for me considering how young and inexperienced and lost I was to that world.

“She reached out to us at the beginning of the Oscars process and told us we could rely on her. She let us stay at her house for the whole month of campaigning prior to the Oscars. She organised a party for both of our families on the day of the ceremony and was a true angel to us.”

First-time Academy Award nominees will generally get some guidance from industry veterans in the run-up to the ceremony, says Belfast-born producer/director Oorlagh George who with her father, writer/director Terry George, won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for The Shore in 2012.

Yet even with the best advice, newcomer filmmakers aren’t always positioned to seize the momentum, she adds.

“It’s definitely one of those things where you have to be in a certain place in your career for it to have a seismic impact. I would say probably a lot of the short filmmakers are not at that moment in their career to best know how to leverage it because they don’t have [another] project that’s ready to go,” she says. “I know another person who won an Oscar for writing the Best Short film. It’s 10 or 11 years later and he’s just directing his first [feature] film.”

Winning an Academy Award is an “indelible credential” that “unquestionably helps you” in your career, she stresses, “just as long as you have the right mix of ingredients ready to go”.​

Being prepared for the next opportunity is crucial, agrees Dublin-born animator and visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham who, along with his colleagues, won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Avatar.

“Depending on what discipline you’re in, particularly in the lighting category or shorts or even in the feature category, it very quickly becomes, ‘What’s next? What else do you have?’

“And I’ve seen plenty of good directors without awards because awards only stem from work. The content itself, no matter how good it is, it opens a door. But you need to have a couple more projects ready to go and pitch.

“The idea that studios are going to say ‘let me throw together 10 scripts for that person’ is not a reality. The truth is, when an appropriate script comes along, your name may come up as part of the discussion.”

Baneham went on to work on Avatar: The Way of Water, and is among the nominees in this year’s Best Visual Effects category. The Avatar cast and crew “ticks along like a proper dysfunctional family”. They’ve established “a good routine and a good rapport” and he knew, after making the first film they would continue to work together.

But still, he understands that many independent filmmakers who have been nominated for an Academy Award will already be looking to their next project.

Over the past week he’s been hanging out with writer/director Colm Bairéad and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí who are nominated for Best International Feature for An Cailín Ciúin. They’re in Los Angeles ahead of tonight’s ceremony and Baneham has been showing them around, making introductions and giving them some advice.

“[I’m telling them] the doors are open, be ready to walk through them. You’ll have a moment in the sun so try to make sure you line up your next gig and do something you really want to do. Do the work that you really want to see on screen.’”​

That’s precisely what Burke did after she won her first Academy Award. “It raises the bar to yourself, that’s really what it is,” she says. “Because, really, in the end, it’s me against myself. It’s, ‘Michèle, can you do this?’ It’s not really looking outwards and thinking about what other people think.

“It’s about saying, ‘the next job I get I’m going to really raise the bar with myself and do something spectacular with some innovative technology or creative twists and turns’ – it’s what I always sought to do.”

Burke says she has only ever competed with her past self, but still, she felt her work was being watched more closely after winning an Academy Award.

“People are watching and thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what is she going to produce now? What’s her next best thing?’ It makes your standard higher than ever. Before you were just doing what you did.

“And then all of a sudden it feels like you’re more under the microscope. You’re looked at harder, judged harsher, so everything you do has to be super.”

Irglová had a very different experience. “I never felt any pressure to be consistently excellent after winning,” she says. “If anything, I felt it took the pressure off, because I had already reached the top and nothing could top that moment. I was happy with that remaining the career highlights, both personally and professionally.”

George says winning an Oscar gave her a more grounded sense of ambition. “I think it probably removed some sense of needing to prove something, and that allows you to maybe focus more on doing what you want to do creatively because you do have a little less to prove.”

Not that she thinks about it too often, she adds. “I only really remember [that I won an Oscar] when I walk into my friend Alex’s house because she keeps it on her coffee table. I don’t keep it myself because I travel a lot and I don’t have a security system and they won’t replace it for you if it’s lost or stolen. And I think it’s probably for the best not to go walking around thinking ‘I’ve got an Oscar,’” she laughs.

Burke agrees: “I think the main thing is that your ego stays exactly where it used to be before. [If you think] I’m king of the castle, it’s quite easy to be pulled down very fast by your peers. And it’s very easy for people to look at you and go, ‘well, if you think you’re too big for your boots, then we’ll show you’, or the test will be so hard that you’ll be critiqued off the face of the planet.”

Still, being an Oscar recipient can serve as a pick-me-up from time to time, she admits. “It’s always a feather in your cap and sometimes I can’t believe it. Sometimes you’re feeling low and thinking, ‘Gosh, what else is here for me?’, and then you think, ‘You did this once and you can do this again. Me then is me now so I can still do this.’”

For Irglová, who last year released her third album LILA – and is touring with Hansard this year – the Academy Award that sits in her recording studio in Iceland is a constant reminder of a defining moment in her life. “I felt it was the thing that gave my life a direction and affected everything else. I probably wouldn’t be where I am today without it. At the time I experienced it as a golden key that opened all these doors and it helps me still today.”

The singer-songwriter and actress will be watching the ceremony tonight and she has some advice for this year’s nominees. Remembering the guidance shared by her “guardian angel”, she says it’s important to “make mental photographs of the night”.

“Blink and imagine every time we blink we are taking a picture getting stored in our mind that remains there to look back upon,” she says, echoing her friend’s wise advice.

“Glen and I were really winging it. We were often just totally out of place and not knowing what we were doing. I think it helped us to stay grounded and navigate our way through it, and that felt true to ourselves. I always felt like the advice I was giving myself was to not get lost and to stay true to myself and my heart, and that was the ultimate compass.”​

George’s advice to nominees is not to get too caught up with networking and talking shop and to enjoy the moment. “Friends of mine directed Everything Everywhere All at Once and I’ve never seen people enjoy themselves as much, because it’s truly an unexpected journey for them.

“And I think it’s the same for the Banshees [of Inisherin] crew. Who thought when they were on this little island that it was going to have this kind of a journey?

“So take time maybe not to focus on the career [opportunities] and to say, ‘this is as good as it gets in life and we’ll maybe never get this moment again.’”

Her next piece of advice is less philosophical and more strategic. “We bet against ourselves so that we would get some money if we lost,” she reveals. “It wasn’t a huge amount of money – maybe 500 bucks – but I would urge everyone to do that too.”

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