An Oscar's true value

How much is an Oscar statuette worth? It's a simple question but the answer's complicated, according to Forbes.com:

Exactly one dollar, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the annual awards show. Since 1950, the Academy has required Oscar winners to sign an agreement stipulating that neither they -- nor their heirs -- will sell their statuettes without first offering to sell them back to the Academy for a buck. Refuse to sign, and the Academy keeps the statuette. "They're not tchotchkes to be bought off of a shelf," sniffs an Academy spokesman.

But, despite the Academy's disapproval, that is exactly what's happening. Industry experts speculate that 150 Oscars have been sold since the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929 -- half of which are likely gray-market sales involving post-1950 statuettes. And those 8.5-pound golden statuettes are fetching as much as $1.5 million on the open market. Prices are lower for post-1950 Oscars because they can't be sold again as easily, but a big-name Oscar rarely goes for less than $60,000. ...

Yet, according to legal experts, it's not even clear how watertight the Academy's agreement is. "The one-page agreement that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences enters into with the recipients of Oscar awards raises enough tricky questions of property and contract law to pique the interest of property and contract scholars," says Richard A. Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Adds Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, "It may well be a binding contract, but it doesn't say anything about damages. The contract isn't broken until the statuette is, say, sold -- at which point there's not much to be done against the seller, since he or she no longer owns it. The only question would be what damages the Academy could collect--the value it could have itself sold the statue for? The literal value of the statuette, which apparently the Academy can crank out like the Treasury minting dollar bills, minus $1?"