Oscars can end up gone with the wind

Over the years statuettes have been stolen or misplaced

MICHAEL Jackson paid more than $1.5 million (now about R18.5m) for the Gone with the Wind Best Picture Oscar at a Sotheby’s auction – one of the highest prices ever paid for memorabilia at auction. But the prized statuette was missing when the King of Pop’s estate was wound up in 2016.

The executors of Jackson’s estate were not certain whether it could have been stolen or misplaced during the hectic period following Jacko’s sudden death in 2009.

Apparently that astronomically-priced Academy Award is still gone – and it’s not the first time an Oscar ended up in auction controversy.

After Aaron Rochin had received his Oscar for Best Sound in The Deerhunter in 1979, he later noticed some blemishes on the statuette and sent it back to the manufacturer to be polished – where it was promptly stolen.

Decades later, in 2013, an American seller, James Dunne, put what appeared to be Rochin’s Oscar on auction on ebay for a starting bid of $25 000.

He claimed to have bought it from a friend who had purchased it at a garage sale, but the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences did not believe it and laid a charge against Dunne for selling stolen goods.

Back in 1942, the Army Special Services – a special branch of the US Army headed by the famous patriotic Hollywood director Frank Capra – made World War II propaganda films.

Capra won an Oscar for one of these, Prelude to War.

Because of metal shortages, the Oscar’s plaque was made from plaster instead of metal.

After the war, the army received an actual metal plaque, but then there was no trace when the Army Pictorial Centre tried to locate it in 1970 for updating.

Then, out of the blue in 2008, one of the world’s leading auction houses listed the missing Oscar for auction.

The ever-vigilant Academy would have none of this and arranged for the return of the Oscar to the Army.

Capra had already died in 1991 at the age of 94.

The Academy of Motion Pictures’ by-laws prohibit its members from selling their Oscars without offering the Academy a right of first refusal to purchase them – for the princely sum of $10.

So, at that going rate, it looks like there is always the possibility of Oscars ending up on auction, as well as more lawsuits or court reprisals. MAY 20 2018