LOS ANGELES — The Academy Awards are the Super Bowl of sparkle, at least to the jewelers vying to adorn all those famous ears, necks and wrists.

Martin Katz, who has outfitted Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet and hundreds of other stars with bling for more than 25 years, said the process used to be more about personal connections.

Margot Robbie arrives at the 2014 Oscars wearing a 60-carat diamond Riviera necklace and 14-carat ring. Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP

“In the early days, through the ’90s and even mid-2000s, we had a much more direct contact with the celebrity. They would come in personally, most of them. Today it is morphed into the stylists. They control that,” he said in a recent interview.

So how does it all work when so many of the world’s top jewelry companies are in the game?

Stylists often choose several different looks per gown for a celebrity client. That can mean they’ve collected hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, worth of jewels.

“Security is part of the process,” said Forevermark Diamonds’ Kristen Trustey. “Our diamonds are well-protected from the time that stylists are visiting the suite to when we are doing drops to celebrities homes or hotels with armored trucks and guards, and of course insurance.”

But it’s a waiting game as to what jewels are actually worn.

On average, Katz said, most A-listers wear between $200,000 to $1 million worth of jewelry each for big red carpets.

“At the Oscars, the biggest risk is that a piece of jewelry were to fall off a celebrity unnoticed,” he said. “Maybe a bracelet becomes unhinged, falls on the red carpet, gets kicked, or an earring falls off and gets kicked and nobody notices. They don’t notice until later it’s gone. We hold our breaths until all the babies come home the next day.”

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