Fifteen of the golden statuettes sell at auction for $3 million. The most expensive was Herman Mankiewicz’s 1941 Best Screenplay Academy Award for ‘Citizen Kane.’
The 15 golden figures were sold to three individuals in a sale conducted online, said auctioneer Nate D. Sanders. The auctioneer would not disclose the identities of the bidders.
Thirteen of the statues were purchased by just one buyer.
The most expensive statuette was Herman Mankiewicz’s 1941 Best Screenplay Academy Award for “Citizen Kane,” which sold for $588,455. The same award had been purchased in 1999 for $244,500.
The 15 statuettes were owned by a Los Angeles businessman with ties to the entertainment industry whom Sanders also declined to identify.
The collector decided to sell the statuettes after Sanders sold Orson Welles‘ “Citizen Kane” screenplay trophy three months ago for $861,542. Welles and Mankiewicz had shared the screenwriting award for the film.
Each of the auctioned statuettes was awarded in the 1930s and ’40s, before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began requiring winners to sign a contract promising that they and their heirs would not sell the trophy without first offering to sell it back to the academy for $1.
The organization opposed the auction, which concluded Tuesday night.
“The academy, its members and the many film artists and craftspeople who’ve won Academy Awards, believe strongly that Oscars should be won, not purchased,” said spokeswoman Janet Hill.
“Unfortunately, because our winners agreement wasn’t instituted until 1950, we don’t have any legal means of stopping the commoditization of these particular statuettes.”
The 1933 Best Picture Oscar awarded to “Cavalcade” went for the second highest price: $332,165. The 1931 Best Picture statuette won by the film “Skippy” — the oldest in the auction — sold for $301,973.
Sanders described the bidding for the statuettes as “extremely enthusiastic,” with the 1941 Academy Award for Best Picture, “How Green Was My Valley,” selling for $274,520. That Oscar had been purchased in 2004 for $95,600, he said.
Other statuettes sold include cinematographer Gregg Toland’s 1939 Oscar for “Wuthering Heights,” which fetched $226,876. It sold for $27,400 in 2004, Sanders said.
Ronald Colman‘s 1947 Best Actor Oscar for “A Double Life” sold for $206,250, and Charles Coburn’s 1943 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “The More the Merrier” sold for $170,459.
The least expensive Oscar was the auction’s smallest — a 1937 technical award presented to Farciot Edouart for development of rear-screen projection. That tablet-like trophy sold for $60,246.