Oscar For Sale

For those artists lucky enough to win an Oscar, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has strict rules in case winners should ever wish to part with their golden prize. In 1951, the Academy included in the regulations that winners are not allowed to sell their Oscar without first offering it to the Academy for $10 (today the sum is a mere $1). This rule also applies to those who inherited or were gifted an Oscar.

A number of times the Academy has taken legal action when an Oscar was being offered for sale. For instance, in 2014 the Academy found their 1951 rule had been violated when an Oscar was sold at auction by the heirs of art director Joseph Wright, who had won the award for his work on My Gal Sal (1942). Joseph Tutalo, Wright's nephew, had consigned the statuette to Briarbrook Auctions and auction house Nate D. Sanders then bought the Oscar from Briarbrook for $79,200. The Academy subsequently went to court, arguing that although Wright had won the Oscar before 1951 he had kept his Academy membership until his death in 1985, which made the sale illegal. Eventually the judge ruled in the Academy's favour and the Academy reclaimed Wright's Oscar for $10.

Spencer Tracy with his Best Actor Oscar for Boys Town (1938) and Bette Davis with her Best Actress Oscar for Jezebel (1938), the latter Oscar sold at auction in 2001 to an anonymous bidder (who turned out to be Steven Spielberg).

Oscars have been sold succesfully in the past, though. For instance, in 1999 David Selznick's Best Picture statuette for Gone with the Wind (1939) was sold to Michael Jackson for a whopping $1.5 million, a trophy that unfortunately went missing years after Jackson's death (I couldn't find information whether it's turned up yet). Magician David Copperfield bought Michael Curtiz's 1943 Casablanca Oscar for $232,000 in 2003 and made a huge profit when he sold it at auction for more than $2 million ten years later. And director Steven Spielberg purchased several Oscars, including Clark Gable's 1934 Oscar for It Happened One Night (for $607,500 in 1996) and Bette Davis' 1938 Best Actress trophy for Jezebel (for $578,000 in 2001). However, Spielberg didn't buy these trophies for himself but, for the sake of preserving film history, returned them to the Academy instead.

Since 1951 Oscar winners are obliged to sign a document saying they won't sell their trophy without offering it to the Academy first. Here is the "Receipt for Academy Award Statuette" signed by Audrey Hepburn in May 1954, after she had won her Best Actress Oscar for Roman Holiday.

Via: Rare Audrey Hepburn (original source: The Audrey Hepburn Treasures)

Audrey Hepburn with the only Oscar of her career