As we all know, acting is a precarious, roller-coaster type business.
The Meryl Streeps, Jack Nicholsons, and Brad Pitts are few and far between.
Most actors or actress will hit at least an occasional “dry spell,” if not a permanent
one.
For a very select few, a seemingly easy solution to help get them through the dry spell financially
might be to sell their Oscar statuette.
I mean, it’s just otherwise collecting dust on a shelf somewhere.
Given only a little over 3,000 Oscars have been awarded since 1929 and there are countless
collectors and movie fanatics out there, you’d think an Oscar statuette would be worth a
small fortune… right?
Alas, not so.
At least, not legally.
Every Academy Award nominee since the mid-twentieth century is required to sign a “winner’s
agreement” contract in which they must agree that neither they nor their heirs will ever
sell their Academy Award without first offering to sell it back to the Motion Picture Academy
of Arts & Sciences for $1.00.
Yes, you read that correctly- one measly buck.
This, despite the fact that the Oscar statuette in materials alone is reportedly worth about
$900, mainly thanks to its relatively thick gold plating.
This forced contract is primarily the Academy’s way of controlling the acquisition of its
trophies.
They want to make sure no Oscar arrives in the hands of private collectors- only those
who earned them or their heirs.
As one Academy representative noted, “They’re not tchotchkes to be bought off of a shelf.”
So what happens if someone refuses to sign the agreement?
The Academy will take back the statuette itself.
It wasn’t always this way, however.
Much to the chagrin of the Academy, those given Oscars before the 1951 award ceremony
were under no such agreement and many of those have been sold over the years.
For instance, Orson Welles’ heirs were able to sell his 1941 Oscar for Citizen Kane in
2011 for $861,542 (about $930,064 today), despite the Academy previously attempting
to bar them from doing so via a lawsuit.
But, in the end, the courts ruled that as Welles had signed no such agreement, his heirs
were free to sell the statuette.
Other heirs who’ve tried similar sales on the pre-1950s statuettes have had mixed results
in winning such court battles against the Academy.
Despite the Academy being extremely aggressive combating any attempts to sell any Oscars,
regardless of era, it is generally estimated that at minimum 150 Academy Awards have been
sold since the first Oscar ceremony in 1929, out of over 3,000 awarded.
Many of these are sold at least semi-secretly so that neither the buyer nor the seller has
to deal with the Academy’s wrath.
So of the known sales, how much do these awards typically sell for at auction?
All amounts, ranging from a minimum typically in the tens of thousands of dollars range
on up.
For reference, the most expensive of the known sales is the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture
for Gone with the Wind.
This was sold to Michael Jackson in 1999 for an astounding $1.5 million (about $2.2 million
today).
Steven Spielberg also famously bought Clark Gable’s Best Actor trophy for It Happened
One Night and Bette Davis’ Best Actress trophy for Jezebel for a combined total of
about $1.2 million.
However, this didn’t upset anyone at the Academy because Spielberg promptly turned
around and donated them to said Academy.
A few other actors have also purchased Oscars in similar ways and donated them back to the
Academy.
You might be wondering at this point what the Academy does with such old statuettes
that it re-acquires in one way or another…
Well, mostly just locks them away in a vault, rarely displaying them to the public.
While this all may seem quite unfair, apart from potential black-market sales of a statuettes,
some who win Oscars are well compensated in other ways for the Academy bestowing the award
on them.
For instance, according to a study done at Colgate University, Academy Award Signaling
and Gender Bias in Hollywood, male actors on average receive an 81% increase in their
pay in their post-Oscar acting years vs. pre-award years, at least some of which seems to be
because of their Academy Award and not just because they’ve been around in the industry
longer.
For women, however, as noted in the study, “winning an Academy Award did not have a
statistically significant effect on women’s salaries in the sample.”
Why this is the case isn’t clear, with a variety of speculative reasons suggested in
the study.
For instance, they noted that younger women in Hollywood tend to get a majority of the
available high paying leading female roles vs. their more seasoned counterparts.
This, combined with the fact that the average age of an actress winning an Oscar is 36.77
years old, around the time most actresses see their earnings decline sharply, it may
be the case that these award winners simply have fewer prime roles to pick from at this
stage in their careers, so have less ability to negotiate higher salaries post-Oscar win.
They are also often forced to round out their careers taking minor roles that pay much less,
which may be potentially masking any statistically significant benefit an Oscar might be giving
them in pay increase given the limited sample size of award winners we have to work with
on the data sets.
On the flip side, the researchers noted that the average age of a male actor winning an
Oscar is 44.67 years old.
Unlike with actresses, leading roles for older male actors are drastically more prevalent,
allowing them greater flexibility in the roles they choose and greater leverage in salary
negotiations.
The researchers also noted that, whether a male actor wins an Oscar or not, their salaries
on average begin to markedly increase past 42 years old, just more so if they also have
the Oscar.
On the other hand, as noted, actresses tend to earn the most early in their careers with
salaries beginning to drop off significantly as they approach the age male actors’ salaries
begin their rapid rise.
Unfortunately, I could find no similar study done comparing non-actor Oscar wins to see
what, if any, future earnings benefit the Academy Award provides them.