The Oscar Statuette: “The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of” Is Worth $1.00

The 95th Academy Awards ceremony held on March 12th was a dazzling event: the film world’s elite stunned in glamorous haute couture, the stage shone with brilliant lights and golden flourishes, and the winners in each of the Academy’s 23 categories were awarded with iconic Oscar statuettes, plated in 24-karat gold. The award, designed by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons in 1928 depicts a knight standing on a film reel gripping a crusader’s sword. The golden knight has fittingly become a symbol of Hollywood nobility, a prize for the greatest accomplishments in the art of film, what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calls “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Yet this same Academy values the award at a mere dollar. 

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Assigning a value to the award seems a difficult task. One must reconcile in a single number the value of the recipient’s artistry, the Academy’s prestige, the exclusivity of the winner’s honor, along with the worth of the copyrighted Oscar figure and the price of the physical award as a piece of art in its own right. Whatever one might imagine that number to be, it is presumably not one dollar. Even stripped of its intangible value, a statuette is estimated to cost about $400 to manufacture, for it is painstakingly hand-made in multiple steps and, of course, plated in pure gold. 

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Valuing the statuette at one dollar might appear ridiculous—comedic, even—but it is one of the many legal regulations the Academy has put in place to “preserve the integrity of the Oscar symbol.” In the tenth clause of its Copyrights and Trademarks Regulations, it states that “Award winners shall not sell or otherwise dispose of the Oscar statuette, nor permit it to be sold or disposed of by operation of law, without first offering to sell it to the Academy for the sum of $1.00.” The rule also applies to any winner’s heirs that may inherit an Oscar. The clause was introduced in 1951 as a way to both restore the award’s integrity after it was commodified by fans and collectors and protect the Oscar symbol from any future diminishment in value (monetary or otherwise). 

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Oscar winners after 1951, as recipients of the copyrighted Oscar figure, have, according to that same regulation, “no right whatsoever” over them. They may only dispose of their awards by selling them to the Academy, a transaction that is more important than the value that is placed on it, but that must still be substantiated by a number. Indeed, the price of one dollar does not represent the worth of the recipient or that of the Academy, but rather helps preserve the Oscar symbol so that it is not commodified, a common occurrence prior to the 1951 clause. Oscars awarded before 1951, which are exempt from this rule, continue to be traded amongst fans to this day, reaching prices that are perhaps less surprising when it comes to Hollywood. According to Vanity Fair, the highest price ever paid for an Oscar was $1,542,500 for David O. Selznick’s 1939 Best Picture Gone With the Wind. The award was bought by Michael Jackson in 1999. 

The Academy’s mission is supported by many of the Academy’s most famous winners. Director Steven Spielberg is even known to have bought and returned to the Academy Bette Davis’ Oscars from Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938) and Clark Gable’s Oscar from It Happened One Night (1934)—for which he paid $607,500. Kevin Spacey did the same with George Stoll’s Oscar for Anchors Aweigh (1945). The Academy and its artists seem to agree that preserving film history also means preserving the Oscar as the epitome of film success. By valuing the award at a dramatically low price, the Academy rejects the notion of the Oscar as an object of trade and brings forth a new interpretation of pricelessness: it may just be worth one dollar.