Bethlehem, Conn.

IT is a story straight out of Hollywood. A beautiful young starlet walks away from a blossoming movie career to become a nun, and 50 years later she returns to the Academy Awards ceremony — as the subject of an Oscar-nominated film.

The real-life drama of Dolores Hart, known as Mother Prioress to the nuns here at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, unfolds in the HBO film “God Is the Bigger Elvis,” one of five nominees for best documentary (short subject). The 35-minute film examines Mother Dolores’s transformation from a Hollywood ingénue and the recipient of Elvis Presley’s first on-screen kiss to a cloistered Benedictine nun at the abbey, where for the past nine years she has been the prioress, the second in authority below the abbess, Mother David Serna.

Scheduled to be shown on HBO in April, the documentary offers a first-time glimpse inside the enclosed abbey and tells the stories of several nuns who live there. It also reveals Mother Dolores’s poignant 47-year friendship with her former fiancé, Don Robinson, a Los Angeles architect, who visited her regularly until his death last year. But is it compelling enough to earn an Oscar? The nuns are praying it is.

For more than a decade, Mother Dolores, 73, has had peripheral neuropathy, a painful neurological disorder that makes walking difficult at times. But on Sunday night, wearing her black habit, she will step out of a chauffeured limousine and make her first red-carpet appearance at the Oscars since she last attended in 1962. “It’s very exciting — absolutely,” she said. “Since I was a little girl, the movies and Hollywood have been a major part of my life.”