Has he ever explained why? I know he’s rich but this must be costing him some significant money. And returning “lost” Oscars to the Academy seems like a pretty trivial use of money.
He loves Hollywood, its traditions and history, and he’s a nice guy (or wants to be seen as one). He has a ridiculous amounts of money and this is one way, for a relative pittance, he can give back to a community which has given him so much.
There’s one at George Bernard Shaw’s house in Dublin. I’ve been there. He got it for the screenplay for “Pygmalion”, and it was reportedly used for years as a doorstop (!) It’s cleanup up now
It still seems nonsensical to me. How is returning Oscars to the Academy giving anything back to the community? Who is benefitting from it?
Sorry for not getting to this for the last six years, but better late than never, eh?
Resurrected four times! You can’t keep a good zombie down.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It’s funny that this show be revived (and not by me) since I saw a couple of Oscars while on vacation in Europe.
French film programmer and pseudo-archivist Henri Langlois’ Honorary Oscar is on display at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris
Shelley Winters’ first Supporting Actress Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank is at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam
Even better, he is the only person to win any Nobel Prize and an Oscar. And to preempt the “Cad, you’re an idiot!”, Davis Guggenhein and NOT Al Gore won the Oscar for “An Inconvienent Truth”.
Chicago’s Field Museum is featuring a Gold exhibit until March 6.
Among the items on display is Susan Sarandon’s Oscar for Dead Man Walking. There’s also an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and some Olympic gold medals. It’s a pretty cool exhibit.
There were a couple others who came close–John Steinbeck, Harold Pinter, and Jean-Paul Sartre were all Oscar nominees as well as Nobel winners.
If he hadn’t bought them and returned them to the Academy for public display, they’d probably be under a pinlight in some millionaire movie buff’s living room somewhere. Public access to history helps keep it alive.
My next door neighbour kept her Emmy in her office window. She won for art direction for the Paul Adams mini-seires. Then her house was burgled so she keeps it hidden now. It was kind of cool to see it in her window.
I think the academy believes that having the award bought and sold like another piece of movie memorabilia devalues it. I believe that recent recipients are required to give the academy the right to purchase the statue back so as to keep them off the market.
MGM Studios displays many of their Oscars in their entry foyer.
Quite impressive as you walk in.
Problem is, MGM has been bought and sold more often than a hooker on Santa Monica Boulevard, and their offices have moved so often, their employees need a GPS to find their desks.
Thus I cannot tell you exactly where their current office foyer might be.
If you should find that entryway, those shiny Oscars are damned nice to look at.
John Ford’s Oscars for How Green Was My Valley (Best Picture and Best Director) are held at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
I seem to remember seeing Oscars at the Oakland Museum of California and the Lone Pine Movie Museum, but I don’t know what they were for.
My brother works at AMPAS, I wonder if he knows.
Here in Chicago a couple of years ago they had an Oscar display at one of the shopping centers on Michigan Ave. It was a temporary thing to promote the show and they had a few Oscars on display, including one (I believe an extra one made for that year’s show) that you could hold and get your photo taken with in front of a podium. My pic w/ the statue is pretty ridiculous looking but I had a lot of fun doing it.
They did the same in LA, in the same complex as the Kodak Theater where they hold the ceremony (Hollywood & Highland). The Oscar-you-could-pick-up had a heavy cable attached to the bottom, so you couldn’t walk off with it.
I’ve also held a couple of Emmys - my buddies worked at the TV academy office…