As we all know, acting is a precarious, roller-coaster type business. The Meryl Streeps, Jack Nicholsons, and Brad Pitts are few and far between. Most actors or actress will hit at least an occasional “dry spell,” if not a permanent one. For a very select few, a seemingly easy solution to help get them through the dry spell financially might be to sell their Oscar statuette. I mean, it’s just otherwise collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. Given only a little over 3,000 Oscars have been awarded since 1929 and there are countless collectors and movie fanatics out there, you’d think an Oscar statuette would be worth a small fortune… right?Alas, not so. At least, not legally.Every Academy Award nominee since the mid-twentieth century is required to sign a “winner’s agreement” contract in which they must agree that neither they nor their heirs will ever sell their Academy Award without first offering to sell it back to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences for $1.00.Yes, you read that correctly- one measly buck. This, despite the fact that the Oscar statuette in materials alone is reportedly worth about $900, mainly thanks to its relatively thick gold plating.This forced contract is primarily the Academy’s way of controlling the acquisition of its trophies. They want to make sure no Oscar arrives in the hands of private collectors- only those who earned them or their heirs. As one Academy representative noted, “They’re not tchotchkes to be bought off of a shelf.”So what happens if someone refuses to sign the agreement? The Academy will take back the statuette itself.It wasn’t always this way, however. Much to the chagrin of the Academy, those givenOscars before the 1951 award ceremony were under no such agreement and many of those have been sold over the years. For instance, Orson Welles’ heirs were able to sell his 1941 Oscar forCitizen Kanein 2011 for $861,542 (about$930,064 today), despite the Academy previously attempting to bar them from doing so via a lawsuit. But, in the end, the courts ruled that as Welles had signed no such agreement, his heirs were free to sell the statuette. Other heirs who’ve tried similar sales on the pre-1950s statuettes have had mixed results in winning such court battles against the Academy.Despite the Academy being extremely aggressive combating any attempts to sellany Oscars, regardless of era, it is generally estimated that at minimum 150 Academy Awards have been sold since the first Oscar ceremony in 1929, out of over 3,000 awarded. Many of these are sold at least semi-secretly so that neither the buyer nor the seller has to deal with the Academy’s wrath.So of the known sales, how much do theseawards typically sell for at auction? All amounts, ranging from a minimum typically in the tens of thousands of dollars range on up. For reference, the most expensive of the known sales is the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture forGone with the Wind. This was sold to Michael Jackson in 1999 for an astounding $1.5 million (about $2.2 milliontoday).Steven Spielberg also famously bought Clark Gable’s Best Actor trophy forIt Happened One Nightand Bette Davis’ BestActress trophy forJezebelfor a combined total of about $1.2 million. However, this didn’t upset anyone at the Academy because Spielberg promptly turned aroundand donated them to said Academy. A fewother actors have also purchased Oscars in similar ways and donated them back to the Academy.

culled from http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/03/much-oscar-worth/