Steve McQueen seems a little het up. The Oscar-winning film-maker is contemplating the shifting sands of the movie industry—specifically, the relentless drip-feed of new digital film formats. “All this technology, it’s changing every five minutes,” he says, “because someone’s making some money out of it.”

He talks about old-fashioned reel-to-reel film, a medium he has used since he picked up a Super 8 camera as a student at Goldsmiths in London (his first movie was of his bus ride home) and that he now appears to regard as a kind of muse. “There’s something romantic about film,” he says. “Some sort of magic—it’s almost like it breathes. Film feels much more...I don’t know. Maybe ‘human’?”

You hear this kind of reverie quite often in Hollywood these days. We may live in an age of bits and bytes but six out of the nine Best Picture nominees at the Oscars this year were mainly or entirely shot on film—not digital—cameras. Tinseltown’s creative classes are a nostalgic bunch and for more than a century their world was ruled by celluloid, the medium in which movies were shot, edited, and distributed to theaters. Many will tell you that there are aspects of traditional film that a digital file just can’t re-create.

Yet, like all things human, the 35mm reel is slowly shuffling off this mortal coil. This year, Paramount Pictures became the first big studio to announce that it would no longer release 35mm prints of movies in the U.S. In the future, the company may make infrequent exceptions (to pacify its most powerful directors) but Anchorman 2: the Legend Continues was, in effect, the final Paramount film to be shipped to cinemas on, well, film.

That the studio didn’t let this be known until after the fact seems to suggest that it didn’t want to be the first of its peer group to break with Hollywood’s analogue past. But nine out of ten U.S. movie screens have now made the switch from 35mm film to digital. Technicolor has shut down its final film lab; Fujifilm no longer makes film for motion pictures; Kodak, the last remaining producer, declared itself bankrupt in 2012 and recently entered discussions with studios in a last-ditch attempt to ensure some kind of infrastructure to support it. And in December 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street became the first major movie to be delivered to theaters in digital formats only—an event all the more striking given the prominence of Martin Scorsese, who directed it, as a custodian of film history.