I was interested in the different locations that an Academy award is on public display. I’ve seen the following:
[ul]
[li]The Academy’s Margaret Herrick library in Beverly Hills has several on display (including Edith Head’s award for All About Eve)[/li][li]The AMPAS office complex on Wilshire in BH also has a few on display. Although there are none in the lobby and upper floor galleries, if you go to any of the other administrative offices on the other floors, you can see some on display (though I don’t remember which ones). The Academy theater also has 8-10 foot-tall statues on either side of the screen.[/li][li]The Warner Bros. museum on the WB studio lot in Burbank has each of the Warner Best Picture winners (six in total, IIRC) on display, including Casablanca, My Fair Lady, and Chariots of Fire. They also have the Special Achievement Oscar for The Jazz Singer from the first year of the Academy Awards.[/li][li]Another Chariots of Fire Oscar is David Puttnam’s personal one, found at the National Museum of Photography, Film, & Television in Bradford, UK.[/li][li]Another pair of My Fair Lady Oscars can be found at the Museum of the Moving Image in London (temporarily closed), which has Cecil Beaton’s 2 awards for the film. You can also see a Palme d’Or (Cannes FF) and Golden Bear (Berlin FF) here.[/li][li]Though not exactly open to the general public, the ephemera archive on the Walt Disney studio lot has the Special Effects Oscar for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on display.[/li][/ul]
Can anyone else say where there is an Oscar (as well as which/whose Oscar it is) on public display?
At Francis Ford Coppola’s winery (Niebaum-Coppola)in the Napa Valley, California, all five of FFCs Oscars are on display. I visited it this past spring, the wine’s not bad, and there museum upstairs as a lot of cool Godfather memorbillia and other stuff from FFC films.
Bausch & Laumb had an Oscar on display in their building in downton Rochester, NY last time I was there (five years ago). Granted it is a technical award Oscar but it looks just like any other.
One of Jimmy Stewart’s Oscars was on display in the front window of his father’s hardware store in Indiana, PA. Now they have a museum devoted to Stewart and the Oscar is on display there. It’s about, oh maybe two hours from where I live.
A few of Disney’s other oscar were available for viewing (As of 1992) at the animation studio at Disney’s MGM Studios at Walt Disney World in Florida. Including, as I remember, the special seven miniature Oscars for “Snow White”.
Reviving the thread to confirm that not only are FFC’s 5 Oscars on display (including his screenwriting one for Patton), but the one his father Carmine won as well (for the score of Godfather II).
Clark Gable’s 1934 Oscar for It Happened One Night", which Steven Spielberg bought at auction was given back to the Academy and is on permanent public display at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study on La Cienega.
This isn’t current, but last year the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago had an Oscars Exhibit right before the Academy Awards, and all of the Oscars that were to be given out were on display before being packed up and shipped to Los Angeles. I must admit that I got more than a little thrill from being a couple of feet away from a number of Oscars that I knew were going to be given to people involved with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Of course, I had no idea then that the movie would sweep, and nearly ALL of those Oscars would go to LOTR people. The sweep made seeing the exhibit, in retrospect, all the more special.
MoMI is now officially permanently closed. While I don’t know whether it applies in these particular cases, most of the items on display came from the BFI’s collections and they now have them in storage. The extent of their stated committment to enabling stuff from their collections to be on public display in London has been a contentious issue for the past few years. Currently, their ideas largely turn on what happens with the plans to move the NFT and their head office to a new site. Proposals have collapsed at least once already and I wouldn’t hold my breath about seeing most of this stuff anytime soon.
