Fifteen Oscar statuettes have sold for a total of $3 million at an online auction, the most money made from a single collection of Oscars in a sale by bid, organisers said. Los Angeles auctioneer Nate D. Sanders said the hot seller of the collection was Herman Mankiewicz’s statuette for best screenplay, which he won for co-writing the 1941 film ‘Citizen Kane’ with Orson Welles. The Oscar sold for $588,455. Welles’ own best screenplay Oscar for the movie, which both the American and British film institutes list as the best picture ever made, fetched $861,542 at an earlier Sanders auction in December.
Other statuettes that pulled in high sums included the 1933 best picture award for the drama ‘Cavalcade,’ which brought in $332,165, while the oldest statuette in the collection, the 1931 best picture award for ‘Skippy,’ netted the third highest total. It sold for $301,973. An Oscar given to Charles Coburn in 1943 for best supporting actor in ‘The More the Merrier’ held special significance as the first statuette ever awarded in the best supporting actor category. It went for $170,459. Oscars are increasingly rare finds at auction.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduced an agreement in 1950 that banned winners from selling their Oscars to anyone but the Academy for the nominal sum of $1. The best picture Oscar for the 1939 film ‘Gone With the Wind’ was sold to singer Michael Jackson in 1999 for a record $1.54 million.
